School of Planning, Design and Construction

On May 6, 2016, Kristina Ford, PhD, senior research fellow in international public affairs at Columbia University, was the recipient of the Honorary Degree Doctor of Humanities from Michigan State University. She was nominated by Scott G. Witter, director of the MSU School of Planning, Design and Construction (SPDC), for her leadership efforts following the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Ford has spent much of her career pushing the boundaries of her profession, and advocating new ways of thinking that can help elevate and improve planning. She served New Orleans for more than 10 years as executive director of City Planning and executive director of the Building Corporation prior to Hurricane Katrina. Although she wasn’t working for the City in 2005 when Katrina hit, she became an immediate public and expert voice on CNN, BBC and NPR, explaining the civic and human consequences in the aftermath of the hurricane. Ford’s award-winning leadership capabilities led to her serving as chief of staff for the deputy mayor in charge of rebuilding the City of New Orleans starting in 2010.

Following the presentation of her degree, the MSU College of Agriculture and Natural Resources hosted a discussion with Ford and MSU faculty and students. The focus of the discussion was on Lessons Learned in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. Several questions and responses from the event follow:

What can be learned from New Orleans as a planner?

Ford talked about how in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina no one was able to reach planners from the City of New Orleans, so people called her for her experienced perspective on the crisis. Advice she had for planners is to “make the most of your work in a city, as you don’t know how long your job will last.” She also recommended learning the culture of a city’s government to help you adjust to how planning can succeed there.

Do New Orleans officials recognize the need for long-term climate change planning?

City planners can write a plan to prepare the community in the event of disaster, but the real challenge is getting support for the plan from the public, so that the emergency plan is adopted. After every hurricane in its 300-year history, New Orleans has responded by fortifying such protections as the levees that surround the city. The cultural attitude toward annual threats of flooding is that citizens—and their elected leaders—assume the City will survive as it always has and, therefore, new ideas to prepare for climate change receive little attention. The plans that exist seem sufficient.

Whereas cities without a history of frequent threats of flooding are more likely to be open to new ideas and new plans to prepare for the floods climate change will cause. This was the case in New York and Boston after Hurricane Sandy. In that storm’s aftermath, the New York City region set about planning for climate change as it rebuilt what’d been destroyed. Boston became proactive about the threat of high tides in its harbor, and furthered the idea of planning for resiliency by initiating design competitions for architects and planners, who were encouraged to imagine how Boston could “live with water.”  

Advice she had for planners included their finding someone on the city council—or on its staff—who is supportive and agrees to convene public forums for discussing climate change. “Civic engagement has to involve education,” Ford said, “which means helping citizens become familiar with how planning can address the prospects of climate change.”

She emphasized the importance of finding target audiences that can lead the way to accepting planning against climate change. One such target audience might be citizens who want to “age in place.” In addition to reaching out to citizens, planners also need to learn about market demands that developers and real estate agents perceive.

Flint wants to dig up their pipes and replace them. Is there a way to have the jobs go to local businesses/residents?

When she was asked about jobs going to locals in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Ford said that she’d advised people asking for her guidance to require recipients of federal contracts for rebuilding to have 50% of their workforce be from New Orleans. In this way, local workers could’ve gained skills necessary for reconstruction, which would have translated into future employment and the ability to repair their own homes. For the same reasons, she recommended that the government in Flint require local workers be hired to perform the City’s recovery efforts.

Follow-up Question: Would better policy help with this (local jobs)?

“It is hard to keep policy effective,” Ford said, “no matter how enlightened it is.”

For example, her first big project in New Orleans was to prepare for the casinos that’d been authorized to open there. The City’s Planning Commission stipulated the casinos would hire locals and also participate in a five-year study of effects caused by the casinos. Casino owners agreed to both stipulations. But, once the casinos opened, they started pressuring the City, threatening to close their operations down unless the requirement to hire local residents was rescinded. The City agreed.

With cities threatened by sea level rise, do you see a shift of economic focus away from these impacted cities to other in-land cities not under this threat (i.e., shift to Baton Rouge over New Orleans as the state’s powerhouse city)?

Ford agreed that for a short period of time after Hurricane Katrina the economic center in Louisiana shifted to Baton Rouge, although as New Orleans recovered the focus shifted back. She highlighted the fact that regulating the real estate industry that exists in flood-prone areas is essential. Ford again mentioned Boston as an example of how cities can encourage developers to initiate resilient designs for their buildings. In New Orleans, she said, developers of low-lying land are constructing residential buildings with parking on the ground floor instead of dwelling units. This simple measure prevents people from living where they’d be vulnerable to floods. She also said that cities can repurpose flood-zone areas as storage space for movable infrastructure, such as buses, which can be easily moved when there is a high-level water threat. She said planning always comes down to getting good ideas out in the world.

“Teaching can be said to offer students a platter of ideas to choose among, and planning is a similar effort. We try to offer an array of good ideas that will include something attractive to each of the many different segments of the city we’re planning for. Together, effecting each of the various ideas will contribute to resiliency,” she said.

Regarding the repopulation of New Orleans, do you repopulate high-risk neighborhoods?

The City had considered a plan to move citizens out of neighborhoods that were either below sea level or in areas predicted to flood. The plan designated these low-lying neighborhoods as future open spaces. Unfortunately, that plan failed to garner public support from those who’d be relocated and from those who already lived where citizens might be relocated. It’s worth noting that 87% of New Orleanians were born in the City and they want their children to find jobs and live nearby, close to where they grew up. Nobody is much interested in changing this pattern and, in part, this attitude explains why New Orleans has effectively set about repopulating high-risk areas.

After Hurricane Katrina, was there any talk about regionalism or regional planning?

Regarding regionalism, Ford said that there was one positive change—which was to reconstitute the individual levee boards as a unified entity. These boards previously didn’t even talk to one another, but because they’ve been combined, they do now. The state is better served. But, beyond this example, there’s been no sustained effort to institute regionalism.

What about population, infrastructure and tourism impacts to New Orleans following Katrina?

Ford said that the City targeted tourist areas as the first part of recovery efforts, which meant other areas in the City didn’t recover for long periods of time. In the few days before and immediately after Katrina, the City saw a significant outmigration of its residents. According to Ford, those with resources—money or a family car—could get to Atlanta; those without such resources were trapped in the City, and the world saw them in the Superdome and in front of the Convention Center. Eventually these unfortunates were taken by bus to Texas, and many of them never returned.

In terms of infrastructure, the City’s hospitals were severely damaged, and medical care was hard to find during the first years after Katrina. Ultimately, Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge announced its intention to build a new facility in New Orleans, on a site where derelict properties could be cleared away. Ford talked about how the LSU facility will provide adequate medical care to citizens, but also brings hope that young New Orleanians will find jobs in the expanded healthcare industry.

What parallels can be drawn between physical and economic disasters?

Ford said that it is better to have a plan in place rather than wait to write it after a crisis. However, she stressed that it is difficult to get officials interested in something that isn’t yet in the public eye, and that doesn’t have buy-in from voters. Ford stressed that “governments need to change how they think about the climate-change future in order to help their constituents make that change, too. Only then will plans be adopted to prevent such disasters as Hurricane Katrina caused.”

What advice does she have for future planners?

“Become planners and you’ll help make cities better,” she said. “My advice is to work hard to remain hopeful and to persevere.” She emphasized the importance of learning the culture of the work environment and mindset of the community, “so that you can trust your planning instincts to fit the local circumstances as you confront difficult problems when they arise.”