Abstract
When renowned planner and professor Edward Blakely was named as New Orleans’s executive director of recovery management in December 2006, he was labeled a “master of post-disaster” by the Los Angeles Times and quickly took on the unofficial title of “recovery czar” (Simmons, 2006). Some fifteen months after the Hurricane Katrina levee failures, with nearly half the population of the city still displaced and the recovery splintered and disappointingly slow, many welcomed Blakely’s appointment with guarded optimism. Blakely’s 2011 memoir, My Storm: Managing the Recovery of New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina, tells the story of his career up to and including his tenure in New Orleans. This first-hand account provides a valuable addition to the literature on a complex and pivotal chapter in the history of post-crisis planning. Blakely’s narrative provides new insights into the administrative wrangling required to garner resources, build political support, and begin carrying out recovery projects. He depicts his years leading the Katrina recovery in a tone that swings from cinematic narration, to self-assured management text, to biting social critique. Given the deeply dysfunctional social, political, and administrative systems that he finds in New Orleans, Blakely suggests that his story might be read as “a cautionary tale” (italics in the original) (7). The story does indeed present several searing lessons regarding the challenges and limitations of post-crisis planning in difficult political circumstances. In so doing, My Storm invites broader questions such as, Do post-disaster planning processes represent, as Blakely suggests, a “window of opportunity” for making major changes or, as Vale and Campanella state, are bold visions for “correcting long-enduring deficiencies” after disasters limited by the “inertia of prior investment” (Vale and Campanella 2005, 345)? How important is knowledge of and sensitivity to local context to disaster recovery planning?
Given the magnitude of the destruction wrought by the Katrina-induced levee breaches and the political and social struggles of the recovery, it is not surprising that Katrina and its aftermath have spawned an enormous wealth of writing, for both academic and popular audiences. The growing collection of Katrina memoirs and personal accounts includes contributions from a range of perspectives including local journalists (Horne 2008), housepainters (Eggers 2010), and Dr. Blakely’s boss during the recovery, former New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin (Nagin 2011). Among the scholarly accounts of the post-Katrina reconstruction planning processes, Clear as Mud (2010) by Robert Olshansky and Laurie Johnson stands out for its depth and rigor. In the introduction to My Storm, Blakely correctly notes that his book chronologically “picks up where [Olshansky and Johnson’s] story leaves off” (6) taking as its primary subject the two years of Blakely’s involvement in the recovery. As a personal memoir rather than an objective recounting of events or an analysis of their social or political meaning, the main value that many readers will find in My Storm is in its particularity and positionality. My Storm provides a glimpse into the self-presentation and experiences of a senior planning scholar and practitioner reflecting on one of the twenty-first century’s most high-profile and complex planning projects.
However, many of the most important tensions raised by that planning process remain unclarified at the end of Blakely’s account. One notable example is Blakely’s treatment of the controversial notion of “shrinking the footprint” of post-Katrina New Orleans to house the city’s shrinking population on its most flood-safe terrain. Early proposals that called for a dramatic realignment of land uses invited impassioned debate in the years preceding Blakely’s arrival. While My Storm wrestles with the problem of allocating limited reconstruction resources to create a safer and more economically sound city, Blakely’s account includes internal inconsistencies that make it difficult to understand where he stands on the footprint issue. This unresolved tension is most visible in Blakely’s treatment of the recovery of the city’s devastated Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood. In describing how his team chose areas for prioritized investment in their Target Area Plan, Blakely states that because “the Ninth became the poster child for Katrina destruction . . . [i]t made sense to designate more than one target area there” (47). Later in the book, Blakely reverses course saying that he did not advocate prioritizing reconstruction in the Lower Ninth Ward because “if you rebuild the Ninth, you’re only asking for trouble, because it will wash away again in the next big storm” (131). While ambiguity is to be expected in addressing such a vexing problem, Blakely never directly addresses the contradiction or probes its underlying social and political meaning.
At several points in the book, it appears that My Storm may be geared more toward students of management and public administration than to urban planners. As implied by its subtitle, the book emphasizes Blakely’s thoughts on management and leadership, replete with football quarterback analogies to describe his improvisational leadership style. He gives in-depth attention to issues such as the assignment of official titles and the specific configuration of his agency’s organization charts, but largely eschews discussion of the planning processes, public participation, or spatial challenges. Blakely’s defiant defense of his former boss, Mayor Nagin, as “one of the best bosses I’ve ever had” (63), is especially surprising given his account of administrative insularity and the unclear mandate with which Blakely himself was hired. As with many other instances in My Storm, these contradictions are left largely unexamined.
When My Storm does turn to physical recovery projects and to issues of social context and participation, the account again may leave readers with more questions than answers. Among the projects that Blakely’s Office of Recovery Development Administration helped to realize, My Storm presents the sprawling University Medical Center (UMC) as among the most significant achievements. Blakely depicts the new $1-billion, thirty-acre campus as a vital part of his “program of economic and social justice” (92). Though the facility may indeed become an important economic driver for the city, the book does not acknowledge the deep controversy that surrounded the project. For planning students, scholars, and practitioners steeped in the discipline’s history of technocratic hubris and environmental determinism, Blakely’s unalloyed heroic account of a mega-project that displaced an entire historic neighborhood may read as surprising and perhaps a bit retrograde. It may be the case that the decision-making processes that led to the hospital project were thorough and well reasoned. Unfortunately, as with many other complex decisions described in the book, My Storm does not give readers access to either the raw political struggle behind the UMC project or to Blakely’s own reflective accounting of project tradeoffs.
Much as Blakely describes his leadership style as improvisational and guided by instinct, his approach to participation as depicted in My Storm is largely informal. The only explicit attempts at gauging public opinion that Blakely describes in the book are his periodic bicycle tours through New Orleans’s neighborhoods (51). While Blakely may have made other attempts to understand the city that he was charged with rebuilding, the book does not give readers much reason to believe this was the case. Throughout the book, Blakely displays little appreciation of or curiosity about the famous cultural richness of New Orleans. He eschews basic local terminology, opting for “median” rather than “neutral ground” and “trolley” rather than “streetcar” for instance (116). On the first page of the book’s introduction, three of the five musicians that Blakely identifies as born and raised in the city have no substantial links to New Orleans (3). In the context of a city legendary for its street culture and jazz, Blakely’s calls for “develop[ing] a clear identity for the place” (46) and his defense of his cultural connection forged by attending “every major classical artistic performance time permitted” are oddly out of step (111). While many of the book’s factual inaccuracies and missed cultural beats could be dismissed as petty and not substantially important, they reinforced the impression that, as Blakely admits, he was widely regarded as “aloof from goings-on in the city” (111). This perception has allowed for his perspective to be widely rejected out of hand by local readers (Horne 2012; Krupa 2012). Perhaps more importantly for academic readers, these debates raise persistent questions about the role of outside technical expertise in shaping cities after traumatic events.
While Blakely’s cinematic style and narrative concision enliven what could be a drab accounting of bureaucratic turf wars, the approach does not lend itself to more substantial reflection on the complex reconstruction project. In the end, My Storm does serve, as Blakely suggests, as a “cautionary tale.” The story highlights the challenges of administering a disaster recovery process in the midst of a city with deeply entrenched racial and class divisions. The recurring frustrations that Blakely experienced as he tried to carry out his ambitious reforms clearly illustrate the problems of viewing a major urban disaster as a window of opportunity for sweeping change.
As advertised, My Storm is truly Blakely’s story of Dr. Edward Blakely’s storm, an unabashedly personal perspective from the leader of one of the central institutions responsible for setting the path of the reconstruction. Like the recovery itself, Blakely’s account in My Storm has been heavily contested by others who were part of the process (e.g., Krupa 2012). Nonetheless, in spite of its faults, and occasionally because of its faults, My Storm is a valuable addition to the growing literature on post-Katrina reconstruction.