Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Lee R. Skabelund / Hurricane Katrina displaced many New Orleans residents, leaving in its wake tens of thousands of vacant lots and buildings. In 2010, estimates show that over 57,000 properties lay empty in the city, especially in the poorer neighborhoods. These properties are not contributing to the fabric of the city; in most places, they are a sign of defeat, an eyesore, or a haven for crime. The neighborhood of St. Roch is experiencing the negative effects of these properties day in and day out and from year to year. Almost a quarter of the lots are vacant in the St. Roch neighborhood, leading to crime and creating a nuisance and a blemish on the community. Coupled with the lack of ownership there is an ailing stormwater management infrastructure leading to areas of flooding after routine storms. In addition to these concerns, there is a lack of fresh, inexpensive and accessible food throughout the area. Although St. Roch’s vacant lots have a negative effect on the community, they present a tremendous opportunity. Their dispersal around the neighborhood presents the opportunity to connect them to churches, schools, retail outlets, as well as providing other uses and services to the neighborhood. The thoughtful design of these locations will demonstrate a site-sensitive approach to the local ecology, culture, and economy of the neighborhood. Such design includes the community throughout the entire lifecycle of each site from its planning phase to the end of its use. The primary goal throughout the planning and design process is to foster stewardship for both the landscape and the community as a whole by means of collaborative planning, direct interaction with each site during implementation, and the observation and monitoring of crucial processes throughout a site’s lifecycle. The intent of this project is to apply a participatory framework to the site design process in order to rejuvenate critical areas of the St. Roch neighborhood. This project seeks to demonstrate the need for a collaborative process while allowing for a balance between the experts who help design each site and the community members who take ownership of the renewed parcels.

This inquiry into informal networks and policy negotiations is set in the theoretical framework of network governance. It builds theory to explain informal networks by examining neighbourhood associations in post-Katrina New Orleans through a variety of qualitative methodologies including interviews, document analysis, surveying and ethnography. In New Orleans, neighbourhood associations do not engage in social-service delivery, they prioritise neighbourhood protection and neighbourhood change. They represent their neighbourhoods through a system of intensive volunteering not elections. That system burns out neighbourhood leaders and leaves associations constantly looking for new volunteers. These associations partner with non-profits, work with politicians, and engage in fierce conflict when excluded from policy negotiations. Finally, they set their agenda based upon the physical characteristics of their neighbourhoods, investing in local institutions. These findings contribute to network governance theory. New Orleans’ democracy of volunteers introduces a new form of democratic anchorage to governance theory. Actors in informal networks have varying priorities. This demonstrates the importance of early involvement by these actors in policy creation and the ways in which policy construction can ignore community. Neighbourhood associations blackmail, bribe and coerce to create their own power, showing how power at the micro-level includes not only resources and decision-making, but also interest. These findings fit into a broader theme. Negotiations with multiple actors improve policy by incorporating complex priorities and neighbourhood context into the policy system. This wider theme of how to address complexity is the policy equivalent of the wisdom of crowds. Policy-makers can either incorporate complexity such as local context and differing priorities or face the conflict and consequences of ignoring it.

Women commonly sold goods on the streets of New Orleans throughout the city‘s colonial and antebellum history. Forming a significant presence among the city‘s market places, they sold various food items which included coffee, calas, and pralines. Perhaps the most popular of the African-American street vendors was the praline women. They attracted the attention of visitors as well as residents. Despite the popularity of these treats, the highly visible and enterprising praline vendors were simultaneously celebrated and caricatured by white observers who depicted them as mammy figures not only in store advertisements and logos, but also in everyday annotations.

This study examines the privatization movement in the post-Katrina New Orleans education system. Less than a month after Katrina, a well-financed charter school movement was moving swiftly through the ravaged city. Nationally, a network of right-wing think tanks and school choice advocates descended on New Orleans shortly after the storm. Locally, state legislators and local leaders pushed from the inside for reform in the way of charter schools. Aided by a state takeover of schools and federal and corporate financing, the "great experiment" had begun. This study strives to cut through the façade of the charter school movement, and to investigate and explain the real motivations of the expected outcomes of the privatizers. Finally, the current injustices caused by the experiment being conducted in New Orleans are reviewed as an extension of the historical racial inequities of the school system.

Beneath the Surface is a collection of seven individual literary nonfiction essays. Five of the essays are personal essays, and three come from the author's contribution to UNO's Katrina Narrative Project. The collection represents the author's cumulative body of work upon completion of her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing at UNO. Titles include: "Beneath the Surface, " "Hello, Harry, " "My One-Summer Bike, " "Just Like Jazzfest, " In Defense of Sodom, " "'Every Year It's Something, '" and "Revising my Approach. The essays explore themes such as sibling bereavement, Latin American travel, the incomprehensibility of death, experiencing new cultures, online teaching, and hurricane evacuation.

Where the Dead Remain is a murder mystery set in a Post-Katrina New Orleans where the gods, magic and monsters of various world mythologies actually exist. The story follows a week in the life of Jude Duboisson, a once magician who is struggling with the loss of his magic and the life he had known in the wake of the storm, as he is pulled out of his torpor and into the affairs of the mighty once again. He is tasked with discovering who murdered Dodge Renaud, the fortune god of New Orleans. What he discovers, though, are some surprising truths about the fundamental nature of things: about loss, about New Orleans, and about himself.

A woman just getting settled in New Orleans with her fiancé is uprooted by Hurricane Katrina. She spends the two months after the hurricane in various parts of Louisiana trying to pick up the pieces of her uprooted reality. Along the way, she encounters ordinary people who act as inspirations and is also reminded of her deceased Chinese grandmother, whom she was care-giver to before she died and whose stories about life in China and the US parallel the woman´s own life during the post-Katrina months of vulnerability and change.

Fingers should demonstrate my filmmaking ability and encourage future employers to hire me to direct a project. This paper will explore in details what methods were used during the production with focus on working within the means of the budget. In the following chapters, I will discuss Fingers, including the writing, preproduction, directing, cinematography, editing, and the final product.

To understand the complexities involved with neighboring in public/private mixed-income communities, I conducted an ethnographic study of a HOPE VI site in a gentrifying neighborhood in New Orleans. Data was collected through 48 interviews, observation, mental maps, and casual encounters with residents living in the predominantly African American redeveloped St. Thomas Housing Development – renamed River Garden. I analyzed residents’ neighboring processes and how they socially constructed space, leading to the identification of several phenomena that shaped neighbor interaction in River Garden. As with previous HOPE VI neighborhood studies, within-group interaction was prevalent while cross-class interaction remained limited. Mechanisms that were intended to facilitate cross-class interaction were neutralized by the exertion of social control. Both limited mobility and neighborhood choice were factors that shaped residents’ perceptions of the neighborhood and motivated residents to either participate in the neighborhood as engaged residents or live as guarded residents dominated by constraints. I delineate the attributes of engaged residents to position neighborhood attachment as an important variable for neighbor interaction. Overall, the evidence illuminates class divisiveness among African American neighbors and demonstrates how the struggle for contested space creates a neighborhood filled with tension.

This study adds to the limited literature on residentially-focused special taxing districts by addressing three questions on crime prevention and security districts in New Orleans. 1) Do the districts share common characteristics? 2) Do they act as a tool to retain residents? 3) Do they represent what A.O. Hirschman would characterize as “exit,” “voice” or neither, and, as such, how do they effect the city’s potential for service improvement? The findings show that the districts tend to be wealthier and whiter, and to have higher homeownership rates and home values than the city at large. However, exceptionalities in three of the newer districts suggest greater diversification. This could represent a shift in the perceived role of neighborhood organizations in meeting residents’ service needs. This study also finds that districts act as mechanisms to retain and, in some cases, placate residents who might otherwise be influential constituencies demanding improved municipal services.