Languid Urbanism

My fondest memory from my trip three months ago to New Orleans was walking through the side streets of the Bywater neighborhood on a sticky weekday night with two good friends. We were walking in the middle of the streets because there were barely any cars driving past or any sidewalks on the side of the road, which is apparently quite common there. (I've tried to adopt this around JP, but it's harder.) The small houses were very colorful and a few kids played in the neighborhood park. With the sun setting, it felt as though we were in a remote Southern corner rather than a city that, even if it's a fraction of the size it was 10 years ago, is one of the country's best known. When I returned in the mornings to my business conference and heard of people's trips through the French Quarter, I knew that my friends had shown me exponentially cooler times. (Among other things, we unknowingly dined next to Michael Fassbender at Maurepas Foods' bar.)


New Orleans' mix of people is inimitable: there are so many leisure and business tourists like me that the French Quarter felt a bit like Cusco;  there are also old-time wealthy and poor white people, old-time wealthy and poor black people, ambitious young professionals who want to help rebuild the cit, and young punk-rockers who can live cheaply (or squat) and push the boundaries because a fair amount of the city is still unattended. These aren't necessarily reconcilable demographics.

When I toured a few housing developments one afternoon, I saw the immaculately new apartment complex next door to broken-down houses and tastefully renovated shotgun houses next door to gutted, abandoned houses. As nice as the latter was, why invest on a street when the rest of it is absent? This is certainly one of the knottiest questions in urban planning, which was thoroughly debated in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, with multiple rebuilding plans that had various levels of sensitivity. Those who remain often want to stay because their lifelong community is still theirs, even if it's in disrepair . And some of those remain don't have another option, are the most vulnerable, and are in need of care. I get it and sympathize deeply, but looking at it in the moment also exposes the ambiguity. When the pace of a city moves so slowly, to where should we divert the currents?

Above are photos from New Orleans of a salvage construction materials store and of the latter juxtaposition of new investment and ignored, washed-away investment.