Some seven years after shoddy levees collapsed and pumping stations failed in New Orleans, allowing a storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River to fill up the city, observers continue to dwell on the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina through memoirs and histories. These include Ray Nagin's Katrina Secrets (2011), Doug Brinkley's The Great Deluge (2006), and Chris Rose's 1 Dead in Attic (2006). There is regrettably much to tell: The storm took the lives of more than 1,500 people, flooded 80% of the city, and caused $80 billion in damage. Former New Orleans “Recovery Czar” Ed Blakely has added a seasoned city planner's perspective on the event with this short memoir of his time in the city. Detailing the often heated political struggles among local, state, and national agencies over control of the recovery funds, the author paints a bleak picture of the Big Easy even before the storm.

Blakely finds that “much of the disaster had happened before the disaster,” with the depopulating city saddled with leaking water infrastructure, sinking streets, a broken school system, and deep racial divisions (pp. 5–6). Further, pre-Katrina New Orleans was simply a “tourist town” (p. 91), with economic stagnation caused by the lack of sustainable local industries beyond gambling and good times. Moving from Australia to New Orleans some 16 months after the storm, and armed with his real-world experiences from helping to manage the rebuilding of post-fire Oakland and post-9/11 Manhattan, Blakely was given little explicit guidance from Mayor Nagin beyond “fix it.” The obstacles before him seemed daunting.

Blakely says that he faced competing recovery plans, rivalry among Nagin's senior executives, a Byzantine city bureaucracy, the bottleneck of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, and attempts by the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority to hijack the recovery money with White House support (p. 86). Nevertheless, he sees himself as leading the recovery efforts by identifying “key areas that could revive faster than the rest of the city” (p. 46) through his Target Areas Plan (TAP), which provided the blueprint for ways in which those communities could recover with targeted loans and incentives for businesses and developers. The TAP strategy—which categorized areas as renew, redevelop, or rebuild zones—“led to the healing process” after “two years of squabbling, dissent, anger, and animosity” (p. 54). As recovery czar, Blakely headed the Office of Recovery and Development Administration, set up Project Delivery Units to coordinate the process of delivering funds, and used city-owned public television channels to get his messages out to the public (p. 124). He also surveyed neighborhoods from his bicycle, bringing along volunteers, staff members, and politicians in his attempts to “communicate the basic idea of the recovery plan” (p. 50) to the people.

Many of Blakely's strategies match evidence from scholarship on recovery and best practices in the field of urban planning. Referencing the work of Robert Putnam, he illuminates the role played by social networks and social cohesion in the recovery process. While Blakely laments that New Orleans “lacks manifestations of [common identity] that foster cohesion” (p. 101), he points out that even “whites on welfare had networks of more affluent friends and relatives” who could assist them following Katrina (p. 116). His own connections to well-placed decision makers and bureaucrats—which scholars have labeled linking social capital—assisted him in bypassing the suffocating bureaucracy as he sought to “get funds for neighborhoods and housing” (p. 108). He also argues persuasively that good governance by itself is no panacea in the recovery process, assailing the “cargo cult delusion about mayoral leadership solving problems” (p. 104). Research has confirmed that politicians usually do too little, too late, and often right before elections (Andrew Healy and Neal Malhotra, “Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy,” American Political Science Review 103 [no. 3, 2009]: 387–406; Michael M. Bechtel and Jens Hainmueller, “How Lasting Is Voter Gratitude?” American Journal of Political Science 55 [no. 4, 2011]): 851–67). I agree with his understanding of the depth of the racial divide in the city (p. 117) and his statement that “rebound in neighborhoods wasn't shared equally” (p. 110).

Because the book is written as a biography, with a narrative structure beginning in ignominy (without invitations to a welcome dinner or inquiries about his living accommodations; p. 38) and ending in success (with a send-off party given by Nagin attended by 150 guests and the designation of his departure date as Edward Blakely Day; p. 144), it is difficult to evaluate Blakely's central claims. Was there a statistically significant difference in the pace of rebuilding in Target Area Plans given highest priority by Blakely and his team, or, as Michelle Krupa has argued (The Times Picayune, 17 January 2012), was the plan “soon forgotten by most New Orleanians because it failed to take shape with real details and spending?” Alternatively, Roberto Barrios has argued that any measurable benefits from the TAP were the outcome of “trickle down economics” (Anthropology News, 17 February 2012). There is also a strong selection-bias problem in evaluating recovery outcomes for these zones, as they were chosen for more funding precisely because they were thought to be early success stories. Blakely himself admits—and scholars like Emily Chamlee-Wright have demonstrated (The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery: Social Learning in a Post-Disaster Environment, 2010)—that for many New Orleans communities, “viability was determined by the mix of people determined to strengthen the neighborhood” (p. 107).

Some neighborhoods—even those with incomes below the poverty line, little formal education, and little attention from City Hall—demonstrated resilience while other areas did not bounce back. The Vietnamese and Vietnamese American community centered on Mary Queen of Viet Nam church in the neighborhood of Village de L'Est, for example, brought back businesses and residents at a time when most of the city remained empty. Its high levels of bonding social capital, along with its creation of links to government authorities, account for much of its success. Strong recoveries, it seems, are more a function of the strength of social networks than aid from the government or damage from the disaster (as I have argued in my Building Resilience: Social Capital in Disaster Recovery, 2012).

While parts of the book resonated well with historical fact and social science theory, other parts seemed peculiar. Large sections are repeated word for word (see pp. 66 and 139, 65 and 140, 76 and 141), perhaps because Blakely included what looks like a transcript of an interview with himself from a visit to Harvard University and then sampled parts of it for other sections of the book. The author claims that he “can tell which ethnic groups occupied an area from its founding to its present” by looking at “trees, porches, and additions to houses” (p. 51). Perhaps most puzzling to me was his decision to refer to Hurricane Katrina in the title of the book as “my storm.” He was not present in the city when it arrived, lost no property due to flooding, and left the city after two years in residence. My neighbors and I who lived through the disaster never personalized the hurricane in this way despite its profound effect on our lives and property. If Blakely's goal was to emphasize his own battles with bureaucracy, this comes across as insensitive.

The book provides a clear window into the political aspects of urban planning, along with the fiscal, social, and political obstacles that block reconstruction promises from being delivered quickly. Students of recovery will learn much from the behind-the-scenes details of the political machinations, and scholars of disaster will no doubt want to empirically test if the intervention of a recovery czar actually makes a measurable difference. Finally, New Orleanians may find themselves counting errors and bristling at Blakely's suggestions that planners relocate parts of the city to less vulnerable sites and stop attempts at rebuilding in areas such as the Lower 9th Ward. History has shown that urban planners staring into the abyss must think, plan, and talk big, and this memoir shows that Blakely was no exception.