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Unified New Orleans Plan
New Orleans, LA
Following Hurricane Katrina, numerous planning efforts were undertaken, but none gained significant traction as an all-encompassing tool for reconstruction. In the summer of 2006, a team including the Rockefeller Foundation, Greater New Orleans Foundation, and Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund commissioned a process that united all past planning efforts and constructively moved toward an overall recovery plan for the city. The effort, dubbed the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP), has the enthusiastic support of city and state officials, who plan to use it to attract public and private reinvestment in the city in a strategic fashion.
GCR played a critical role in the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP), serving the various teams and agencies in three ways. First, GCR developed a comprehensive “Data Atlas” that provided up-to-date information on all facets of the city’s recovery. Using its capabilities in data-management, GIS mapping, and information technology, GCR was able to provide geographically specific data elements to inform planning teams about the unique characteristics and recovery pace of each of the city’s planning districts and neighborhoods. GCR summarized this data in a series of maps, custom text, and tabular formats at various geographical levels.
GCR also contributed an analysis of present population estimates and likely future population trends as part of the Plan’s “Baseline Recovery Assessment”—a comprehensive chronicle of the impact of the storm and the status of recovery. These projections and the accompanying narrative explanation were a key determinant of the overall policy framework and redevelopment paradigm that emerged from the Plan.
GCR’s final major role in this project was to serve as the interface between the single city-wide planning team and the four district-level planning teams. In this role, GCR provided each district team with specific contractual expectations; facilitated district team meetings; performed technical reviews of planning documents submitted by the district-level teams; and played a principal role in formulating policy and plan narrative for the recovery plan on the basis of input from the district planners.
The Unified New Orleans Plan was finalized in January, 2007 and subsequently adopted by the City of New Orleans and Louisiana Recovery Authority.
