Response to “Post-Disaster Planning in New Orleans”

Eugenie L. Birch

FAICP, the Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research and Education, chair of the Graduate Group in the Department of City and Regional Planning, and codirector of the Penn Institute of Urban Research, University of Pennsylvania

“Overcoming the Challenges” offers a dramatic firsthand account of one way universities, especially those training professional students, can respond to a disaster. Its emphasis on the service contributions of city planning students and faculty is illuminating and well-told. However, as any effort of this magnitude reveals, it raises a key question: how can universities stay true to their core missions (research, instruction, and service) while carrying out their fiduciary and moral responsibilities as recipients of public and private funding (from state budget allocations, tuition payments, donations, and foundation and government grants)?

When a disaster strikes, especially one of the dimensions of Hurricane Katrina or Rita that decimated New Orleans and several other cities along the Gulf Coast, the immediate, human response is to help the stricken places immediately. Universities share this impulse, justifying their pursuit as fulfilling their servicemissions. But unlike individuals, universities have wider missions and often look to comply with other parts of their missions. We learn in “Overcoming the Challenges,” that the universities in question did pursue the broader ends. They not only offered service but also developed coursework related to the New Orleans planning process and in this very article, are attempting to generalize knowledge from the experience, that is, engaging in action research.

The Cornell/Illinois/Columbia/Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) case is one way in which universities responded, but there were other approaches. Let me discuss some of those, using the University of Pennsylvania as an example. First, many universities offered space in their own classrooms for those students whose institutions were closed due to storm damage. Penn hosted hundreds of students in the undergraduate and graduate schools. Others contributed their skills and resources in research, instruction, and publication, as did Penn with its

comprehensive provost-led initiative, the ongoing “Penn in the Gulf” project started in 2005.

In September 2005, less than amonth after Katrina, Provost Ronald Daniels, supported by President Amy Gutmann, determined that Penn should craft a response. He accomplished the obvious first step immediately: welcoming displaced students from Tulane, University of New Orleans, and other institutions to the university for the fall semester to continue their graduate and undergraduate studies uninterrupted.

Daniels then went further. He convened a faculty committee to determine how the university could assist the distressed communities quickly and effectively. One answer soon emerged; others evolved. First, it would target the collective intelligence of recovery experts drawn fromall over the United

States to convene, publish, and disseminate policy approaches and advice for national, state, and local decision-makers. By December 2005, Donald Kettl, Stanley I. Sheerr Endowed Term Professor in the Social Sciences and director of the Fels School of Government, and Howard Kunreuther, Cecilia Yen Koo Professor of Decision Sciences and Business and Public Policy and codirector of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, the Wharton School, had organized a conference

in Washington, D.C., that focused on addressing the risk assessment issues that had to be solved before rebuilding could take place. Within a couple of months, they had published and widely distributed the results as On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina (Daniels, Kettl, and Kunreuther 2006). It was on the desks of all U.S. congresspersons by early spring and was well-received in the academic world, as seen by Journal of the American Planning Association reviewer Kenneth Topping’s comments: “[It] constitutes a valuable contribution exhibiting careful insights on the Gulf Coast experience as a framework for the national challenge of minimizing future disasters” (Topping 2007, 476).

The faculty also recommended a second conference focused on rebuilding issues. Organized by Susan Wachter, the Wharton School’s Richard B. Worley Professor of Financial Management and codirector of the Penn Institute of Urban Research, and me, it convened social scientists, designers, educators, and social workers—a blend of academics and practitioners. For example, it included a strong cultural/economic development component organized by Nick Spitzer, host of NPR’s Big Easy–based “American Routes” program. In record time, Penn Press turned around its proceedings, Rebuilding Urban Places after Disaster: Lessons from Katrina (Birch and Wachter 2006), which were widely distributed and favorably reviewed. New Orleans’s Executive Director of Recovery Management Ed Blakely wrote that it is a “remarkable collection. . . [with] cohesion . . . plus information and data that few of the many other works on Katrina provide” (Blakely 2007, 357). Both books have found their way into university libraries and course syllabi, thus extending the knowledge.

Meanwhile, in April 2006, the Rockefeller Foundation under the leadership of Judith Rodin, former president,University of Pennsylvania, gave a $3.5 million leadership grant to underwrite the Unified New Orleans Plan referred to in “Overcoming the Challenges.” Shortly, Rockefeller realized that New Orleans lacked the technically trained affordable housing and community planning/development experts to undertake the rebuilding. It turned to Penn’s Center for Urban Redevelopment Excellence (CUREx) for help. Within a few months, CUREx, working with the University of New Orleans and several community-based organizations, including Providence Community Housing, New Orleans Neighborhood Collaborative, and Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans, had established a training/internship program that in July 2008 graduated twenty-eight students. Now proficient in housing finance, construction, and other necessary skills, the Fellows all have long-term employment

commitments in New Orleans.

After launching the books and the CUREx program, Penn in the Gulf developed other initiatives. The schools of Social Policy and Practice, Nursing, Dentistry, and Engineering established a multidisciplinary public health clinic in Hancock County, Mississippi, in conjunction with the University of Southern Mississippi, which supplied vitally needed services in 2007–2008. It supported ongoing student contributions. When CUREx Fellows and their employers reported their lack of data and maps, it financed twenty-one masters in city planning students to provide technical assistance during the 2008 spring break and nine more in the summer. It also assisted more than one hundred undergraduates in the Penn Fox Leadership Program to work on construction projects during the break, with fifteen returning for the summer.

As the authors of “Overcoming the Challenges” and we, at Penn, evaluate these efforts, a number of questions emerge. They range from the practical experiences (Who were the clients in the Cornell/Illinois/Columbia planning project? How do we identify and work with local partners?

How do we match our goals and aims with those of our partners? How do we develop long-term capacity in those we are assisting? How do we continue to integrate the work into the more physically distant programs of the contributing universities?) to the more general (Can we create a template for

university responses to disasters so that the next time one happens [and there will be next times], we will know what to do? What level of resources can we devote to these projects and for how long? Should they be centrally led or should we look to programs and departments to initiate them in the university?) As Richard Gelles, chair of Penn in the Gulf and dean of Penn’s School of Social Policy and Practice, observed, “it isn’t as simple as it seems” (Hughes 2008, 41). As “Overcoming the Challenges” shows, Gelles is quite correct. So what are some next steps? Reflections such as this set of JPER articles are essential. But more needs to be done with regard to how universities—not just specific programs—react in these situations. Penn will convene a small conference on the topic next year. Hopefully, more will be shared by participants in the Gulf responses and others, and through this work, we will continue to delineate the university mission in the twenty-first century.

（文章来源：Journal of Planning Education and Research excerpts）