Rebuilding, Social Justice, and Community Life
Frederic Schwartz, the architect selected by the citizens of New Orleans and the New Orleans City Planning Commission to re-plan one third of the city for 40% of its population explained how the opportunity for rebuilding the city could be a chance to strengthen social justice and community life:
The planning of cities in the face of disaster (natural and political) must reach beyond the band-aid of short-term recovery. Disaster offers a unique opportunity to rethink the planning and politics of our metro-regional areas -- it is a chance to redefine our cities and to reassert values of environmental care and social justice, of community building and especially of helping the poor with programs for quality, affordable, and sustainable housing.
As lead planners for District 4, the district that includes the "largest concentration of public housing in the city" (Iberville, St. Bernard, Lafitte, and B. W. Cooper), Schwartz challenged his team to make "every effort to involve the residents and the community in the planning effort," while ensuring that the design of the new housing "could maintain the look and feel of surrounding neighborhoods with a mix of both modern interpretation of historic typologies and new urbanist models."
Read more about this topic: Reconstruction Of New Orleans
Famous quotes containing the words social, community and/or life:
“Edith: Does anybody want me to flatter and be untruthful? Hotchkiss: Well, since you ask me, I do. Surely it’s the very first qualification for tolerable social intercourse.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“I don’t think Dr. King helped racial harmony, I think he helped racial justice. What I profess to do is help the oppressed and if I cause a load of discomfort in the white community and the black community, that in my opinion means I’m being effective, because I’m not trying to make them comfortable. The job of an activist is to make people tense and cause social change.”
—Al, Reverend Sharpton (b. 1954)
“The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)