The ravaged neighborhoods of New Orleans make a grim backdrop for imagining the future of American cities. But despite its criminally slow pace, the rebuilding of this city is emerging as one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s. And architecture and urban planning have become critical tools in shaping that new order.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s plan to demolish four of the city’s biggest low-income housing developments at a time when the city still cannot shelter the majority of its residents. The plan, which is being challenged in federal court by local housing advocates, would replace more than 5,000 units of public housing with a range of privately owned mixed-income developments.

Billed as a strategy for relieving the entrenched poverty of the city’s urban slums, it is based on familiar arguments about the alienating effects of large-scale postwar inner-city housing.

But this argument seems strangely disingenuous in New Orleans. Built at the height of the New Deal, the city’s public housing projects have little in common with the dehumanizing superblocks and grim plazas that have long been an emblem of urban poverty. Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States.

So it’s not surprising that many of its residents suspect a sinister agenda is at work here. Locked out of the planning process, they fear the planned demolitions are part of a broad effort to prevent displaced poor people from returning to New Orleans.

New Orleans seems to have progressed a lot since I was here at Jazzfest. Fewer debris piles. More FEMA trailers. More construction activity.

But it's still pretty grim.

They haven't finished the repairing the breach at the 17th street canal, much less replaced the whole damn thing for being poorly engineered. They are installing a gate and some pumps to provide a second layer of protection.

Didn't get a look at the industrial canal breech, or the lower ninth. Gentilly is still looking devastated. We'll be there in the morning helping put up a new house.
- mark 12-05-2006 8:21 am [add a comment]