Planning Tremé : the community development field in a post-Katrina world

Abstract

A Network of community development (CD) organizations in New Orleans and nationwide collectively framed Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as the result of willful government failure to protect an original American city and its most vulnerable residents. They saw their efforts to equitably redevelop the city as seeding a renewed social movement for economic and racial justice that would result in the self-determination of local low-income communities of color. This interpretation built on their shared activist histories, especially the movement origins of the CD field that championed the self-determination of low-income urban African-American and Latino neighborhoods. Yet, chronic tension within CD between the field's enduring movement aims and its institutionalized practices emphasizing housing production seriously constrained the Network's efforts. By late 2006, Network organizations had split apart over the future of New Orleans public housing. This dissertation is an in-depth case study of the first 15 months after Katrina that uses participant-observation to explore this tension and its implications for the movement possibilities of the CD field. I argue that there are three mechanisms of institutionalization that stratify the field and constrain its movement aims: a) the marketization of community development, b) the reformation of poverty, and c) the radicalization of community organizing repertoires. In New Orleans, these three mechanisms combined with intense civil society conflict, the roll-out of neoliberal deconcentration policy, a weak local political economy, and competing cultural repertoires within the Network to undermine collective action. Institutionalized race and class inequalities were reproduced within the Network and urban space. When the federal government proposed to demolish 70% of the city's public housing, one Network cohort agreed to redevelop the Lafitte projects while another filed a resident class action lawsuit against the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Lafitte redevelopment cohort came to control a substantial portion of land in Tremé/Lafitte and the resident participation process in redevelopment. Resident participation was a narrowly construed process of site planning, especially compared to principles of resident participation enshrined in neighborhood recovery planning serving mostly middle-class New Orleanians. This unanticipated Network polarization proved instructive. Economic human rights and equitable development activism has grown out of the Network and the Gulf Coast. This suggests Page 2 of 271 possibilities for movement renewal in the institutionalized community development field, particularly by re-appropriating the mechanisms of marketization, poverty reform, and the radicalization of community organizing. Community development's incorporation into the neoliberal political economy has opened up spaces for political resistance by practitioners working within the system. A new discourse of economic human rights points to a reorientation of the field around low-income residents' right to the city. Finally, community organizing can be reintegrated into CD, beginning with internal organizing processes as a means to develop a new theory of power to transcend historical institutional distrust within the sector.