Bringing Democracy Home: Post‐Katrina New Orleans

Ironically, Katrina uncovered social and economic disenfranchisement among poor African Americans in New Orleans at a time when the United States was actively, and literally offensively, exporting ideals of democracy. At issue should be the problems of US democracy, and more precisely, how to redesign New Orleans based on inclusive and participatory principles of democracy. This intervention draws in part from the late Iris Young's book Inclusion and Democracy (2000), which articulates a post-Habermasian perspective1 in an urban context. Post-Habermasians embrace Habermas' (1984) vision of a deliberative model of democracy, but also recognize that communities are internally differentiated and thus not unified. Framing issues from this vantage point moves beyond the romance of diversity (Jacobs 1961) to consider frictions of difference. Following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's (1985) seminal work, Young (2000) contextualized issues of difference in cities, generically, and clarified the prominent role of segregation in the evolution of inequality (see also Young 1999).2 Her perspective gives as much attention to identity politics as to issues of class, and, although her referencing suggests unawareness of geography as a discipline, her approach nonetheless rests on the logic of spatiality, representing society and space as mutually embedded. Young argued that segregation by class, race and ethnicity builds walls around neighborhoods, thereby preserving opportunity for the privileged while excluding the unprivileged. Such walls inhibit inter-neighborhood communication and maintain ignorance, which in turn reinforces segregationist practices and uneven opportunity. Ignorance is spatially produced. Whether explicit or implicit, planning for segregation is, therefore, undemocratic; segregation itself fosters inequality. This perspective is germane to post-Katrina New Orleans because it helps interpret why and how Katrina's victims were overwhelmingly African American and poor. Normatively, Young's critical framework sets an agenda for communication, interaction, and cooperation among segregated groups. Consistent with Young, I take undoing segregation and its ills as a major problem in tackling problems of inequality, and in particular, social and economic disenfranchisement in New Orleans. Young's urban contextualization of post-Habermasian thinking is crucial but nonetheless limited because the framework lacks attention to hardcore realities such as economy and governance. Further, the framework lacks attention to persistent segregation within so-called “mixed” neighborhoods (by class as well as race/ethnicity) and “integrated” schools. Below I suggest that such on-the-ground problems arise from unidimensional conceptualizations of multidimensional phenomena that require thinking at the intersection of society, economy, and governance. My purpose is to critically synthesize and reconfigure pertinent concepts from literatures that conventionally are mutually exclusive to set an agenda to rethink planning for the future. The task is not to add economy and governance to social difference, but to critically interweave them. From this perspective, the construction of market diversity, for example, might be conducive to undoing segregation and its ills only if it is constructed with issues of social difference and governance in mind; the dimensions cannot be separated because the goal is neither market nor social diversity alone, but rather an inclusive, deliberative political economy. Without concern for the social, market diversity readily translates into “new urbanism”, which claims interest in “mixing” while in practice homogenizing in the interests of real estate developers and local elites (Elliott, Gotham and Milligan 2004).3“Diversity”à la “new urbanism” is economically but not socially conceived and thereby pertains to “mixed use”, irrespective of the mix (or lack thereof) of people. Similarly, planning for integrated neighborhoods with reference to housing and schools4 is a social design without, however, recognizing that most people spend most of their days working; economy matters. Nancy Fraser's (2005) call for incorporating economy into a post-Habermasian framework is welcome, but it addresses only the broad issue of distribution, as a backdrop; it is silent on how to generate a productive local economy, as are specific calls for a socially conscious rebuilding of New Orleans (e.g. see commentaries on post-Katrina New Orleans in City and Community by Greenbaum (2006), Venkatesh (2006) and Briggs (2006)). In light of neoliberal realities that underpin urban planning (Brenner and Theodore 2002), calls for social inclusion in the long run will be relatively ineffective without attention to market reform and how to construct such reform so as to intersect with identity politics, housing, and so forth. Integration has to be about more than location (ie whether people associated with different social groups are locationally mixed). It would be sensible to design a system in which people from different groups interact constructively in many contexts (work, home, neighbourhood …) so as to learn about one another to engender trust, and in turn enable creative and productive solutions to problems (and in the long run inculcate knowledge, not ignorance, about differences to children). Working with the assumption that social difference is an asset, not a liability, I am interested in connecting issues of social difference with those of market diversity, which is theorized as an asset, specifically in mainstream economic theory5. My intention, however, is to stand mainstream economic theory on end, using its ideas about diversity but reconceptualizing them relative to issues of social difference and democracy. Moral significance notwithstanding, inequity is unfruitful in the long run because it wastes talent and threatens the sustainability of a social economy. How, then, might issues of social justice connect with those of competitiveness? Economic theory points to ‘agglomeration economies’ (efficiency that accrues to a place due to the clustering of diverse economic activities) and also ‘transactions economies’ (efficiency due to high density of inter-firm transactions) as guidelines for competitiveness (Scott 1988; Wood and Parr 2005), but these concepts lack a social dimension that recognizes the trust and cooperation required for efficiency. Social capital and structure may be invoked (Granovetter 2005), but the economic processes remain faceless because these concepts pertain to groups, when indeed it is individual people within different groups who interact. The value of social capital, specifically in a mixed neighborhood context, cannot be realized without regard for which people are connected. Developing social capital among organizations in mixed neighborhoods would pivot on a democratic vision of “relational capital”, a concept used relatively infrequently. “Relational capital” is pitched not at the usual scale of organizations such as firms, but refers to positive sentiments such as trust and respect that emerge from individual relations among specific people in different organizations or firms (Kale, Singh and Perlmutter 2000). Although normally confined to business relations, the concept requires extension beyond the conventional boundary of work because the community envisioned here is one of work and residence. In the context of longstanding segregation, ongoing business and community relations among people with different life experiences would constitute an unusual foundation for dense, overlapping networks, which in turn engender opportunity for increased interaction. To the degree that connections among diverse people and groups can be sustainably productive, relational capital would connect with continually increasing (economic) returns. From this vantage point, those who may be otherwise unconcerned with social issues might profit from the social-economic linkage. Post-Katrina New Orleans offers an intriguing opportunity to develop a built environment in which “mixing” can enter the social economy at the design stage of a neighborhood. To move beyond locational sensibilities to the spatiality of social relations, undoing segregation requires the construction of communities in which the blurring of residential and work life enters at the design stage to avoid the tensions resulting from bringing a minority group into a neighborhood where norms of the majority are entrenched. The concept “communities of practice”, a social theory of learning and knowledge creation through daily practices and routines of interaction, is germane (eg Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). As an approach to knowledge creation, this concept has been tapped in business research to engage firm-related issues of innovation (e.g. Brown and Duguid 1991; Nonaka 1994) and in economic geography, somewhat more broadly to encompass issues such as democracy (Amin and Cohendet 2004). Concretely, “communities of practice” is useful towards designing a system that would embed ideals of inclusive, deliberative democracy in the social and economic built environment. Beyond initiatives to mix groups broadly by class, race and ethnicity in residences, schools, and business, the residential and local business districts should be mixed by democratic design to produce a built environment conducive to interactions and communication among different citizen groups. An individual neighborhood might include different types of residences such as houses, apartments, condominiums, and cooperative living designs. Mingling of people from different types of residences during the course of daily rhythms in the neighborhood park, school, grocery store, restaurants, services firms, and so forth conceivably may increase learning and erode negative imaginaries born of ignorance. The local business district should also be internally mixed. Complementary goods and services should be locationally mingled to facilitate cooperative business networks that spatialize social relations through strategic overlaps among different network groups. For those lacking resources, proactive measures (e.g. business “incubators” to aid new firms in their first few years, training programs, financial assistance) are crucial towards insuring that people otherwise understood in terms of “majority” and “minority” may share business space, coordinate ventures, and productively interact. The goal: proactively plan and build to cultivate a local social economy based on communication and interaction among different types of people engaged in complementary production, distribution, and marketing of goods and services in a neighborhood. “Communities of practice” has been conceptualized with reference to workplaces that are, however, a far cry from realities of Taylorist-style, minimum-wage work that may characterize the circumstances of, for example, many New Orleaneans; thus, actually constructing residential–work communities of practice in post-Katrina New Orleans is a tall order. The first step in this regard is recognizing multiple capitalisms—that is, multiple ways in which capitalism plays out; from this vantage point, the second step, proactively, is to select the type of social economy that is desirable to construct. My main suggestion is that established community organizations such as ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now)—a national organization that has been active in post-Katrina New Orleans (eg ACORN 2006a, 2006b)—develop new types of demands and reconstitute the discourse of “assistance”. In particular, the conventional demand for jobs needs to be understood as a short-run solution. In the long run, at issue are not just jobs but the type of job. The usual approach in the United States to assisting the US poor entails attracting investment to provide jobs; this translates into enlisting some of the poor in low-wage jobs that offer little to no opportunities for upskilling and job mobility. If the goal is to construct “communities of practice”, then government assistance needs to be directed towards new firm formation, which would require incubators as well as government-sponsored firm service centers and network brokering. These types of services were established in rural areas of the United States for the development of local networks of small manufacturing firms in the 1980s and 1990s following numerous localized recessions (see Rosenberg 1992); the idea is germane, irrespective of services or manufacturing production or a combination of the two in a rural or urban environment. This is not to say that local context and economic history are unimportant. To the contrary, it is crucial towards determining types of firm networks, and concomitantly, the types of services that are required. What I want to suggest, however, is that the formal record of economic history—the “industrial mix”—denies voice to the talents represented by those who have been denied access to opportunity. Consider John Kretzman and John McKnight's (1993) radical planning alternative: determine local assets not by the existing capital stock but rather by assessing the local talents, many of which are untapped. This approach requires field research to identify talents and potentialities. Jenny Cameron and Katherine Gibson's (2005) adaptation of this approach in the Latrobe Valley in Australia is instructive, though it stops short of carrying through to firm formation and assessing the potential to sustain livelihoods based on the uncovered talents. Concretely, this approach requires connection with firm services and network brokering. Crucially, demands related to the economy require configuration with issues often understood as social, such as housing, safety, and schools. Connecting back to issues of relational capital in mixed neighborhood contexts, the long-run agenda should be to construct overlapping residential and work networks in communities of practice that are internally heterogeneous. A difficult agenda! The built environment can be rebuilt to embed principles of inclusive, everyday democracy, yet this must be understood as the material preamble to the development of mechanisms to formally and informally institutionalize appropriate values and thereby guide individual decision making (North 1990). This type of concern also requires further extending the postHabermasian democracy framework, which is directly concerned with “the political” but tends to overlook on-the-ground politics. The governance of a mixed local business district requires a proactive local government to work with the variety of local citizen groups in a mixed residential neighborhood. Local officials and citizens need to recognize and derail informal restrictions on who participates in the local business district and who can gain access to capital for developing small businesses locally. Proactive locational as well as network brokering strategies with sensitivity to a priori unevenness of resources (and related assistance strategies) are fundamental requirements. Although it is often assumed on the Left that the wellbeing of those who are unprivileged depends on bottom-up politics, I advocate neither a wholly bottom-up nor top-down politics; top-down politics are exclusive and bottom-up politics alone are confrontational and in the long run are unlikely to “win” in a neoliberal world.6 Rather, I call attention to some of the literature on “new citizenship” that embraces a cooperative, not a confrontational, politics; actors of cooperative politics recognize hard realities of existing hierarchies and aim to change power relations by manipulating, not displacing them (Alvarez 1998; Dagnino 1998); this perspective (having evolved from a standpoint of conflictive politics following frustrated missions) sets an agenda to change the face of power by working through structures of power, not as political puppets but as proactive citizens. This approach is bottom-up in the sense that change is developed among citizen groups, but changing the face of power means working with established authority to influence decision-making processes and, ultimately, the outcomes; it is about working to ensure a circulation of power. Immediate calls for housing, jobs, and citizen participation in rebuilding New Orleans are necessary but lack a long-run agenda that would direct energy and resources away from replicating the segregation that produced the inequities exposed by Katrina. I have sought to identify a mix of principles to guide a revised agenda towards an inclusive, deliberative political economy. While broad-based, I have nonetheless made some concrete suggestions that may prompt questions as to where the money might come from. In light of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent in a spuriously conceived war in Iraq, it is sensible to suggest redirecting public funds and services (at multiple scales) towards an agenda for social justice at home. However, government funding and services represent a top-down scenario that alone cannot constitute a foundation for significant change. Also required is intervention by individual citizens and community organizations based on an agenda to create meaningful opportunities for interaction in work and residential life among heterogeneous citizen groups. Setting an agenda to undo segregationist practices in residential neighborhoods, schools, and business districts in New Orleans to foster productive mixing through overlapping social, economic, and political networks might stimulate the kind of political transformation the United States allegedly exports. I thank James DeFilippis, Bob Lake, Don Mitchell, Laura Pulido, and Dan Reff for helpful and insightful comments. I also thank Veronica Crossa, Alistair Fraser, and Christy Rogers, who read and constructively commented on an earlier version.