Walking to New Orleans: Ethics and the Concept of Participatory Design in Post-Disaster Reconstruction
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
Two and a half years after the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, New Orleans and south Louisiana continue to struggle in an unsettled gumbo of environmental, social, and rebuilding chaos. Citizens await the fruition of four successive recovery and reconstruction planning processes and the realization of essential infrastructure repairs. Repopulation in Orleans Parish has slowed considerably; the parish remains at best two-thirds of its former size; thousands of former residents who wish to return face barriers of many kinds. Heroic efforts at rebuilding have occurred through the efforts of individual neighborhood associations and voluntary associations who have attempted to address serious losses in affordable housing and health care services. Walking to New Orleans traces how a dominant but paradoxical model of the relation between the human and natural worlds in Western culture has informed many environmental and engineering dilemmas and has contributed to the history of social inequities and injustice that anteceded the disasters of the hurricanes and subsequent flooding. It proposes a model for collaborative recovery that links principles of ethics and engineering, in which citizens become active, ongoing participants in the process of the reconstruction and redesign of their unique locus of habitation. Equally important, it gives voice to the citizens and associations who are desperately working to rebuild their homes and lives both in urban New Orleans and in the villages of coastal Louisiana.
This is a Logos Reader Edition. Learn more.
In Walking to New Orleans Robert and Deanne Ross have
written an important book about the tragic conditions in New
Orleans. Or, we really should say, the New Orleans tragedy--for the
symbolic importance of what happened and what did not happen there
will doubtless stand on its own for years to come as a symbol of
what can only be described as a national loss of the sense of
community. For not only did New Orleans lose itself, but all of the
rest of us lost New Orleans. We lost it by reading and not
thinking, by watching and not seeing, by knowing and not acting. By
not really caring enough about our fellow citizens, friends, and
neighbors. This is quite a beautiful book in its conception,
expression, and deep valuing of human beings and their communities.
And it raises important questions about who we are and what we have
become as Americans in the twenty-first century.
--Chris Wye
Founder and Former Director
Center for Improving Government Performance
The National Academy of Public Administration
Walking to New Orleans is an astonishingly informed and
informative account of one of the major human, natural and
political disasters in recent memory. Having personally suffered
the furor of Katrina, part-time New Orleans residents and longtime
students of Louisiana history and Cajun culture Robert and Deanne
Ross have written a book that is must reading for anyone concerned
about the implications of the interplay between our natural
environment and political process for questions of social justice.
Weaving together historical, theological, scientific, political and
economic analysis, they create a compelling narrative about
pressing issues whose significance extends far beyond this
particular event. Not content with criticizing the mistakes of the
past, the Rosses develop a richly suggestive notion of
“Participatory Design,” which can serve as a model for future
development. Issuing an ethical challenge that we ignore at our own
peril, this book is social criticism at its best
-Professor Mark C. Taylor
Chair, Department of Religion, and Co-Director of the
Institute of Religion, Culture and Public Life, Columbia
University, and
Cluett Professor of Humanities, Williams College.
Product Details
- Title : Walking to New Orleans: Ethics and the Concept of Participatory Design in Post-Disaster Reconstruction
- Authors:
- Ross, Robert R. N.
- Ross, Deanne E. B.
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Publication Date: 2008
- ISBN: 9781630872120
Robert R. N. Ross currently teaches courses in the areas of
philosophy and the study of religion at the University of
Massachusetts, Boston, and at Starr King School for the
Ministry/Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California; he
also works with congregations in transition as an ordained
Unitarian Universalist minister. Ross has been a teaching fellow at
Harvard University, a philosophy professor at Skidmore College, a
consulting engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation (where he
holds patents in the design of complex, heterogeneous computer
networks), and a senior consultant at the National Academy of
Public Administration, where he has worked with large-scale
organizations and agencies in transition. Robert is an active
surfer, kayaker, and leader of the Cajun-Zydeco band les
cigognes.
Deanne E. B. Ross is a civil rights attorney and a member of the
bar in Massachusetts,
Louisiana, the District of Columbia, and the United States District
Court for the District
of Columbia. She served as trial attorney in the Civil Rights
Division, Voting Section, of the United States Department of
Justice for over ten years, as Special Counsel to the State
Legislature of Louisiana on voting and redistricting for three
years, and, most recently, as Special Counsel to the City of
Springfield, Massachusetts. Deanne is also a working artist in
fabric and paint media.