Shelley Poticha Letter

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It seems to me that it is incumbent upon the CNU to respond to Hurricane Katrina if the movement is to be more than simply a dialogue amongst ourselves. As Nathan Norris and David Brain (and perhaps others) have noted, the New Urbanists have the personalities and the expertise to bring clear-headed and fair-minded views to a situation that is tremendously fraught with bigotry and knee-jerk reactions.

I would amply echo David's framing of the challenge as more than simply the job of rebuilding history or slum clearance. This is the social justice issue of our time. Taking just the point of transportation: The Mayor of New Orleans said that while 80% of his city's residents were able to evacuate, the remaining 20% didn't have the resources or transportation to get out. Our nation has relied so extensively on cars and airplanes as the means of moving from city-to-city (and eviscerated our national rail network in the mean time) that when the time came for Amtrak to do it's part to help get people out in advance of the storm, no one even considered it as a relief valve for those who didn't have choices. The President said today that we now have a national gas crunch and "if you don't need to buy gas, don't." OK. Where does that leave us?? We haven't invested in building the infrastructure to allow us to get out of our cars.

Remember 9/11. At the time, I felt that the New Urbanists strengths weren't best suited to take a high profile role in the discussions about what to do next, since our members were not primarily big city urbanists and there was already a strong NYC design community. I still feel that way, despite the problems that have emerged from that process.

But the situation in the South is different. We have deep expertise in so many relevant areas: Hurricane rebuilding (Andrew and the various efforts of our Floridian colleagues), community engagement (NCI, et al), mixed-income neighborhoods (HOPE VI, etc), parallel transportation networks (my organization and the many transportation task force members), environment....And, the challenge fits precisely with the scales of the Charter.

Shelley Poticha
President
Reconnecting America

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Last edited by Johanna Nyden.   Page last modified on September 02, 2005