New Orleans: A Prophetic City of Resilience and Innovation

Mercatus Center Chief of Staff RetreatFebruary 2009

Cities have become the dominant global human habitat of this century in terms of

geography, experience, constituency, and influence

Morgan Grove Cities: Managing Densely Settled Social-Ecological Systems, 2008

OLD WORLD/ NEW WORLD

THIS

THAT THAT THAT

this

affects

this

Systems/Capital in a City

Financial

Social

Bonding

BridgingSpiritual

Natural

Cultural

How a prophetic city?

• Disconnected from the local• Public policies/investments driven by distant

priorities/decision-makers• Degraded natural assets• Disrupted neighborhoods• Structurally supported divisions by race,

ethnicity, and class• Export economy extractive and exploitive:

oil/gas, fisheries, tourism and gambling)

Perverse Opportunity

• Self organization emerges

• Communities form ‘hubs’

• And need ‘links’

• And together these create ‘connective tissue’

• No master plan, no simple answers, no outside experts with a magic bullet

QuickTime™ and a decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

A ‘problem’ in a city …

is work that still needs doing

Enabling conditions

Identify locals who pay attention to real, particular things

• Hubs and links: connective tissue that supports reciprocal transactions

• One size NEVER fits all: devolution encourages differentiation

• Subsidiarity brings clearer accountability

Examples of Connective Tissue

• www.squanderedheritage.com

• www.lakewoodbeacon.org

• http://www.npnnola.com/

• www.staylocal.org

• www.ideavillage.org

• http://www.helpholycross.org/

• http://www.9thwardnena.org/home/

Entrepreneurship and Innovation

- Fostering self-organization

- On-the-ground listening

- hubs

- Identification of responsive capacity

- Patient, dis-aggregated capital

- Organizational development support to form links that support transactions