Master rebuilder takes on New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS -- When Mayor C. Ray Nagin tapped Edward Blakely to be this city's recovery czar, Blakely knew instantly the assignment was made for him.
"Whatever the biggest challenge is, that's the one I want," Blakely said in a recent interview.
The professor of urban affairs helped develop recovery plans after the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 and the Oakland Hills wildfire two years later.
He was dean of the Milano Graduate School at New School University in New York in September 2001 and coordinated the management of students and the campus in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack.
"I'm discovering that New Orleans is so much like the other places, and I thought it was going to be so much different," Blakely said. "The big difference here is the scale. Most cities, you're dealing with a part of the city. In this case, no one was untouched."
Blakely, known as the master of post-dis aster, spoke before returning to Australia, where he has been teaching at the University of Sydney for two years and guiding that city's latest metropolitan plan.
In his new position as executive director for New Orleans recovery management, which he assumes Jan. 8, Blakely will guide the rebuilding of basic infrastructure and ensure that public and private strategies for resettling the city mesh.
"We think he's the best in the world to help us to get through the recovery," Nagin said when he announced Blakely's appointment this month.
Nagin has been criticized for taking 16 months to hire someone to take charge of the city's revival, but Nagin has argued that he was waiting for "momentum and clarity" on how the recovery effort would be structured and financed.
Blakely's "skills are best not at removing debris or dewatering the city, but actually replanning the city," he said. "So I may not have been able to do very much in that early period, and we might have had to wait until we had this degree of stability."
The appointment of Blakely has been greeted with enthusiasm. "He is a brilliant, wonderful person who knows how to build and work with teams," said Robert Cervero, chairman of the City and Regional Planning Pepartment at the University of California, Berkeley, a position Blakely held more than a decade ago, in a region where Blakely served two mayors. "He brings a world of experience and gets things done."
Blakely, whose salary is expected to be about $150,000, comes to a city in the throes of scattershot property restoration, increased public safety concerns, and widespread frustration among homeowners still awaiting federal funds to rebuild their homes.
Blakely said one of his first moves would be to try to "restore public confidence."
Among his priorities is continuing to "build on the healing process" by ensuring that all residents, even those displaced, have a chance to participate in the city's revival, and rebuilding public works infrastructure -- roads, mass transit, waste removal and telecommunications.
Blakely also talks about increasing safety, not just police protection, but "hospitals that work, schools that work. All the things that make you feel secure," including easy access to grocery stores and laundry facilities, he said.
Another task will be diversifying the economy, as well as creating a plan for residential areas that draws on modern urban-planning ideas of people concentrated near the city center with "mixed use" communities of living space above stores and restaurants.
"He looks at cities mainly from the perspective of people," Cervero said. "He understands that neighborhoods are engines that create a good-quality city."
Blakely said he envisioned a New Orleans of about 500,000 people, a figure he thinks is achievable in about a dozen years. The city's current population is estimated at 200,000 to 250,000, down from 450,000 to 485,000 before Katrina.
"The question is how do we rebuild and ensure that the people in that part of the city are [as] safe and secure as people in the rest of the city are," he said at the news conference announcing his appointment.
The issue of which neighborhoods can realistically make a comeback has been fraught with controversy, including the belief by some that there is a conspiracy to keep blacks and the poor from returning to the city.
Blacks constitute the largest percentage of still-displaced New Orleanians. "I think we are striving and struggling to come to something that can fairly be called a consensus on the future," said Michael Cowan, assistant to the president at Loyola University.
