Can pro-equity hybrid governance shape an egalitarian city? Lessons from post-Katrina New Orleans

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how different housing actors (social resilience cells and their partners, institutional structures, neighbourhood communities) in post-Katrina New Orleans have activated their social capital into institutional capital. It uses a critical up-to-date synthesis of social capital enriched by governance theories to investigate how new governance hybridities can be shaped in order to guide the city’s housing redevelopment. Furthermore, the paper seeks to evaluate the potential these governance hybridities have in redeveloping the city toward an egalitarian post-disaster city. By this is meant a city in which all affected neighbourhoods are recognized for their unique housing and social needs as well as for their distinct sociodemographic and physical characteristics, and where different social resilience cells are responsive to the needs of specific communities. The paper examines the unique rebuilding footprint and governance formation potential of eight social resilience cells in New Orleans. The results show that governance-improving fermentations were mostly brought to life by pro-equity and pro-comaterializing social resilience cells and their alliances at the local level during the late recovery years. Nonetheless, the new forms of governance are dominated by the pro-profit political economy paradigm. As such, the potential of the improved governance hybridities in facilitating egalitarian socio-spatial effects has remained moderate.

KEYWORDS:

• social resilience cells
• social capital
• institutional capital
• governance hybridity
• egalitarian city

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors are grateful to the anonymous referees for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper, as well as to Liana Simmons for the high-quality editorial work.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 ACV/SUN are sister non-profit organizations sharing the same offices and working together. We treat both organizations as one SRC. However, they are legally separated with different boards and funding sources. ACV is responsible for community organization, whereas SUN is responsible for the service part of housing. SUN was set up with the purpose of building synergies with ACV and becoming the latter’s ‘branch’ for housing policy implementation.

2 Except for HRI. It offered in-depth interviews with its higher ranked staff (president and vice-presidents) and a visit to the Iberville construction site.

3 During the early recovery years when disaster funding was more abundant, most SRCs were financially sufficiently equipped to serve their mission, and hence less motivated to activate their social capital to trigger institutional transformations for more productive governance frameworks. In the later and more austere recovery years, many SRCs became undercapitalized and under stress to stay active in the ‘reconstruction scene’ and to avoid mission drift.

4 GNOHA has a 501c4 tax status, which allows it to be an advocacy organization. Non-profit housing builders with a 501c3 status (most alternative SRCs) are not legally allowed to advocate.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen (FWO) [grant numbers 83682 and 11F3513N].