Rebuilding community after Katrina: transformative education in the New Orleans planning initiative, by Ken Reardon and John Forester, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2016, 296 pp., $34.95 (paperback), ISBN-13: 978-1439911006, ISBN-10: 1439911

摘要

Rebuilding Community After Katrina represents a collective attempt by Cornell students and faculty staff to make sense of their experiences with planning for rebuilding in collaboration with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the primarily African-American residents who returned to the Ninth Ward of New Orleans after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flooded many homes and businesses. Cornell faculty staff and their students clearly worked very hard, and the People's Plan that resulted from their efforts, which is displayed, in part, in chapter 5 has all the marks of an excellent plan: it is well presented, concise, grounded in local architectural forms and resources, and with choices clearly outlined. The functional difficulties of outsider status in New Orleans, such as information and institutional connectivity, nonetheless proved hard to resolve. The mobile workshop managed to do a neighborhood condition survey in four days - a remarkable amount of work - but when the Cornell team won a contract and then was subsequently fired as part of the plan to rebuild, it becomes obvious that outside consultants, even well-meaning, skilled, university-led consultants, can succumb to local needs for political control. The editors first pose these issues, explore them a bit, and then lay them aside unresolved, focusing instead on the conclusion that the workshop was a transformative experience for the students.