A year later, New Orleans fights ‘planning fatigue’

New urbanists converged on the New Orleans area this fall for four more planning charrettes. One was a follow-up on an earlier charrette in St. Bernard Parish, to design a new town center. The others were part of the Unified New Orleans Plan for Recovery and Rebuilding (UNOP), a process intended to guide investment in infrastructure and other improvements throughout the city.
Goody, Clancy & Associates led planning for three districts: one containing the Central Business District, Warehouse District, and French Quarter; a second consisting of Gentilly and surrounding neighborhoods; and a third covering the Bywater/Marigny section. New urbanists from firms such as Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., HDR, and HOK also worked at aiding the slowly reviving area.
“It was surreal how few people showed up at meetings this time,” says Ann Daigle, who has devoted herself to new urbanist rebuilding efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi for over a year. “We went from 800 to 1,200 in a meeting a few months ago down to eight to 12 these past weeks. The people of NOLA [shorthand for New Orleans, Louisiana] are totally burned out.”
Daigle summarized some of the progress as follows: The group in Gentilly focused on making

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