Michael Frisch

Introduction: New Orleans and the Design Moment

Urban Design after DisasterWhat Does Urban Design Have To Do with a Disaster Like Hurricane Katrina?AsparticipantsintherecoveryprocessinNewOrleans,wehavewrestledwiththeabove question in our applied planning and design research over the past fouryears. As the Editors of this special issue, our goal is to encourage scholarlyreflectionaboutourprofessional,pedagogical,political,andpersonalresponsestothe disaster and what lessons we can glean from this experience for urban design.For starters, the disaster in New Orleans is significant to urban designpractice and theory because it was the result of a catastrophic design failure ofurban infrastructure—the hurricane and flood protection system of New Orleans(Hurricane Katrina External Review Panel (HKERP), 2007). Approximately80–85% of New Orleans flooded (Figure 1) not from a direct hit by the hurricane,but because of a series of errors in the design, construction, and maintenance ofthe levees, floodwalls, and canals that comprised the federal hurricane protectionsystem on 29 August 2005 (Steinberg, 2006; Seed et al., 2006; Houck, 2006).This aspect of the catastrophe as a design failure combined with the sheerscope of the urban region and population impacted by flooding, fire, and winddamage placed the planning and design professions at the centre of the disasterresponse-and-recoveryprocesses.Yet,whathappenedintheimmediateaftermathwas critical because the public narrative quickly grew beyond mere restoration.Within a few days statements like those of the former Mayor of CharlestonS. C. Joseph Riley, a founder of the Mayor’s Institute on City Design, wereubiquitous:The design decisions that you make today will affect the people in yourcommunities 100 years from now. You have the opportunity to think bigand you have been empowered to do great things. Eventually, the worstwill be over and your city will be better than it was before. Throughoutthe course of our history, all cities have raised from their challenges tobecome better cities than what they were before. (Riley, 2005)In the weeks and months following the disaster, people began to discuss andvisualize ways in which the basic urban structure of New Orleans, including

Regional Economic Impacts of Environmental Management of Radiological Hazards: An Initial Analysis of a Complex Problem

We conducted an economic analysis of four different billion-plus dollar technological options for managing the salt wastes in the high-level waste tanks at the Savannah River nuclear weapons site (SRS) in South Carolina, USA. While US Department of Energy leadership is appropriately most concerned with health, safety and the environment, the economic implications of the choice cannot be dismissed. Combinations of technologies, where the technology is to be designed and tested, and who pays for it, were considered. With the caveat that the engineering designs are not the final versions and are therefore subject to change, we found that the most expensive technologies to design and build may not produce the most jobs or the greatest gross regional product in the SRS region because a great deal of the design and engineering from prototype to testing will not be done in the host region. Furthermore, in terms of the local economic impacts in the SRS region, this analysis shows that the policy choice regarding the method of funding the project (which budget the money comes from) matters as much as the selection of the remediation technology.

Downsizing and Worker Separations: Modelling the Regional Economic Impacts of Alternative Department of Energy Workforce Adjustment Policies

Lewis D., Frisch M. and Greenberg M. (2004) Downsizing and worker separations: modelling the regional economic impacts of alternative Department of Energy workforce adjustment policies, Reg. Studies 38, 67–83. Fifty years of huge investments by the US Department of Energy (DOE) in some regions has resulted in the DOE being the de facto steward of their regional economic health. With the end of the cold war, job reductions of DOE contractor workforce have severely impacted these regions. DOE worker separation policies may cushion or intensify these impacts. Using an economic simulation model, we examined the impacts of three different worker separation policies: the ‘painful response’ (no severance packages), the ‘current response’ (the current average of DOE separation packages), and the ‘supportive response’ (more lucrative severance and continued medical coverage). The analysis is split on two regional axes: (1) more rural DOE regions, as in the area surrounding the Savannah River Site (SRS) near Augusta, GA; versus (2) more metropolitan locations, such as the area surrounding the Rocky Flats Site which is in the Denver MSA. The results indicate that recent legislation which enhances worker separation packages for nuclear defence workers will substantially help the workers and their DOE-dependent communities cope with the negative impacts of DOE restructuring. Our research also corroborates earlier work which asserts that the state can play an effective, positive role in helping workers and communities adjust to economic restructuring.

New Orleans and the design moment

1. Introduction: New Orleans and the Design Moment 2. The Unbuilding of Historic Neighbourhoods in Post-Katrina New Orleans 3. Whose City Hall Is It? Architecture and Identity in New Orleans 4. Urban Design and Civil Society in New Orleans: Challenges, Opportunities and Strategies in the Post-Flood Design Moment 5. From Green Dots to Greenways: Planning in the Age of Climate Change in Post-Katrina New Orleans 6. Imageability and Justice in Contemporary New Orleans 7. Reconstructing Devastated Cities: Europe after World War II and New Orleans after Katrina