Rebuilding Community after Katrina chronicles the innovative and ambitious partnership between Cornell University’s City and Regional Planning department and ACORN Housing, an affiliate of what was the nation’s largest low-income community organization. These unlikely allies came together to begin to rebuild devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  

The editors and contributors to this volume allow participants’ voices to show how this partnership integrated careful, technical analysis with aggressive community outreach and organizing. With essays by activists, organizers, community members, and academics on the ground, Rebuilding Community after Katrina presents insights on the challenges involved in changing the way politicians and analysts imagined the future of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. 

What emerges from this complex drama are lessons about community planning, organizational relationships, and team building across multi-cultural lines. The accounts presented in Rebuilding Community after Katrina raise important and sensitive questions about the appropriate roles of outsiders in community-based planning processes.

Ken Reardon is a Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of Memphis. He received the American Institute of Certified Planners President's Award, the Dale Prize for Excellence in City Planning, and the Ernest Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Community Engagement for his work on university-community participatory action research.  John Forester is a Professor of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. He recently published Planning in the Face of Conflict and Dealing with Differences: Dramas of Mediating Public Disputes, and is the co-author (with Norman Krumholz) of Making Equity Planning Work: Leadership in the Public Sector.