Change and continuity in post-Katrina New Orleans Available to Purchase

In post-Katrina New Orleans the City Charter endorses the designation of the City Planning Commission (CPC) as the lead agency for both urban and recovery planning. The municipal level of government and the theory and practice of planning thus achieve positions of dominance in the recovery process. The paper notes a number of correspondences between the New Orleans model and Habraken's hierarchy of control of urban change, in which control over the top level, the city, confers dominance over the actions of agents operating at all lower levels. The post-Katrina planning literature records, however, that despite its mandate the CPC becomes just one agency operating within a competitive context in which the cataclysmic destruction of the physical environment is not reflected in the associated social structure of the city's agents of change. A considerable continuity of tenure within the membership of the city level's agents emerges from the literature, and the control of the recovery planning process becomes a common objective. The paper concludes with an assessment of the degree to which they succeed in exerting a controlling influence on the content and implementation of the recovery plans.