Louisiana Chapter Plans for Community Recovery and Rebuilding

The impact of Hurricane Katrina has permanently changed the State of Louisiana, its people, and its future. With that come not only challenges, but opportunities. With the assistance of the American Planning Association, the Louisiana Chapter responded by providing a revised program and theme for its annual conference, held October 7-8, 2005, in Shreveport, Louisiana.

The theme, "Planning for Prosperity: Opportunities in Post-Katrina Louisiana," explored economic development initiatives important to rebuilding a prosperous, sustainable future for the state.

Click here to view and download conference materials and presentations from the Lousiana chapter website

As part of the conference, the chapter offered a lively and productive Recovery Workshop for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

On Friday afternoon, workshop faculty offered presentations on planners' roles in disaster recovery. The following morning, a visioning exercise provided participants with an opportunity to determine a sense of direction and purpose about recovery of their own impacted communities. For each geographic area participants assessed:

• damages in the area
• recovery and rebuilding issues
• guiding principles for regional/community recovery

The intensity of the event was heightened by the reality that some workshop participants had not yet seen what damage had occurred to their own homes.

Click here to visit the Louisiana Chapter's website which will soon have a full account of the workshop. Materials will include: PowerPoint presentations made by faculty at the Friday afternoon session, summary reports of each geographic area from Saturday morning's visioning exercise, and a contact information list of all workshop and exercise participants.

Workshop Staff

Edward J. Blakely
Edward Blakely is Chair of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Sydney, Australia, and chair of the reference panel guiding Sydney's Urban Strategy. Previously he was Dean of the Robert J. Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy, New School University, New York City. He was also professor of economic development at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of the Institute for Urban and Regional Development.

He organized and led the Oakland response to the earthquake of 1988 and the Oakland Fire in 1991, the largest urban fire in the 20th century. He moved to New York just prior to the attacks at Ground Zero and became one of the leaders in the city recovery effort helping guide citizen and community planning efforts.

Blakely has trained a number of planners who worked in New Orleans and developed a strong working relationship with local universities including Dillard and the University of New Orleans.

Fred May
Fred May has worked as a planner since 1973. He spent a year with FEMA as Long-Term Recovery Manager in Stockton, Missouri, a community devastated by a tornado in 2003. May has been with ATCS, PLC, an engineering and planning firm in the Washington, D.C. area, since fall of 2004. As a contractor for ATCS, he led the FEMA Long-Term Recovery Planning effort in Charlotte and Escambia Counties in Florida in the fall of 2004 and winter/spring of 2005.

May also worked with FEMA in the development of a Long Term Recovery Needs Assessment tool for determining the type and extent of Long Term Recovery Planning efforts needed within a community struck by a disaster. He is currently leading a project for FEMA to better determine the Recovery Value of potential projects that emanate from a long term recovery planning process and developing a self-help guide for communities that addresses the concept of long term recovery planning

Jim Schwab, AICP
APA Senior Research Associate Jim Schwab served as the primary author and principal investigator for Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Redevelopment (PAS Report No. 483/484, December 1998), which APA produced under a cooperative agreement with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. More recently, he co-authored with Stuart Meck Planning for Wildfires (PAS Report No. 529/530, March 2005), and is a project editor for the newest PAS Report, Landslide Hazards and Planning.

He also participated as an APA representative on an eight-member interdisciplinary reconnaissance team that traveled to Sri Lanka in May 2005, at the invitation of the Sri Lankan Institute of Architects, to help develop recommendations for long-term reconstruction after the tsunami. He served as the project manager for a FEMA-supported project in which APA has developed training for planners on the planning provisions of the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, and for the Firewise Communities Post-Workshop Assessment, a contract with the National Fire Protection Association to determine the impact of its Firewise workshops on community behavior.

Ken Topping, FAICP
Ken Topping is president of Topping Associates International and teaches part-time in the City and Regional Planning Department, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He is former planning director for the City of Los Angeles City (1980s) and San Bernardino County (1970s), later becoming general manager of the Cambria Community Services District (1990s). He recently was visiting professor for two years (2002-2004) at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University, from where he undertook disaster prevention and recovery planning advisory assignments in Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan. Topping is co-author with Jim Schwab of Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction (PAS Report 483/484, 1998), a primary reference source on disaster recovery.

While with Los Angeles, Topping coordinated preparation of the city's pre-event Recovery and Reconstruction Plan later used during the 1994 Northridge earthquake recovery. After leaving the city, Topping became a planning consultant with private and public sector clients, among which were the city of Oakland after the Oakland Hills fire (1991) and the California Office of Emergency Services following the Northridge earthquake. Topping served on two advisory missions to his birthplace Kobe, Japan, after its catastrophic earthquake of 1995. He is presently co-authoring a new book, Opportunity in Chaos: Post-earthquake Rebuilding in Los Angeles and Kobe, with Rob Olshansky and Laurie Johnson.