Creating resilient cities: advocacy and planning for equity-based recovery

1. INTRODUCTION: UNDERSTANDING RESILIENCE BEYOND ‘BOUNCING BACK’ OR ‘FORWARD’

Two decades ago, on 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, leading to the failure of the city’s levee system and the subsequent extensive flooding. The storm induced a massive urban devastation, destroying nearly 70% of all occupied housing units, while disproportionately displacing the city’s socially vulnerable groups, particularly low-income residents and African American communities (Comfort 2006; Ehrenfeucht & Nelson 2011; The Data Center 2016; Johnson 2006). In the years since, New Orleans has undergone a lengthy process of recovery and rebuilding. This raises a critical question: to what extent has the city achieved resilience in the aftermath of such catastrophic disruption? The 20th anniversary of Katrina offers an important moment for critical reflection, not only on the city’s recovery and resilience-building trajectory but also on the broader conceptual meaning of resilience in urban contexts at large.

The notion of resilience was initially conceptualised as the capacity of systems to ‘bounce back’, i.e. to absorb shocks and disturbances while maintaining their essential structures, functions and relational dynamics (Holling 1996: 31, cited in Davoudi & Porter 2012). In this view, resilience often implies a rapid restoration to pre-disaster conditions, commonly achieved through engineering solutions designed to minimise the possibility of failure; yet this interpretation drew substantial critique, and scholars began to argue that a return-oriented conceptualisation of resilience is problematic for several reasons:

• it frames hazards as external ‘disorders’ and, thereby, concentrates on geographical regions of risk rather than on socially vulnerable populations who are most affected (Oliver-Smith 2004; Few 2003)

• it presumes a stable equilibrium that fails to account for human adaptation, transformation and the complexities of social systems (Lorenz 2013)

• it may reinforce pre-existing conditions of vulnerability by privileging the restoration of structures and power relations that contributed to disaster risk in the first place (Manyena 2009, cited in Local Environment 2011).

In response to these critiques, resilience scholarship increasingly embraced a more dynamic interpretation of resilience which was redefined as the capacity of systems to ‘bounce forward’. This shift highlights transformative adaptation, suggesting that strengthening systems goes beyond technical robustness in engineering or ecological terms; it also requires addressing equity, justice and deeply rooted social vulnerabilities (Manyena 2009, cited in Local Environment 2011; Davoudi 2012, cited in Davoudi & Porter 2012; Cutter et al. 2008; Vale & Campanella 2005, cited in Duval-Diop et al. 2010). Yet this reconceptualisation has generated new lines of enquiry. Scholars now ask not only about the outcomes of resilience-building but also about its direction, beneficiaries and agents—resilience for whom, by whom and toward what kind of future (Porter & Davoudi, cited in Davoudi & Porter 2012; Kuhlicke 2013; Local Environment 2011). These questions emphasise the power asymmetries rooted in social systems and the risk that recovery processes may reproduce or even exacerbate socio-spatial injustices (Davoudi & Porter 2012; Cannon & Müller-Mahn 2010, cited in Davoudi & Porter 2012; Kuhlicke 2013; Leach 2008: 13, cited in Davoudi & Porter 2012; Teigão dos Santos & Partidário 2011).

Departing from earlier conceptualisations of resilience as an undeviating, linear capacity to resist disturbance and merely ‘bounce back’ or ‘bounce forward’, more recent studies have introduced a richer socio-spatial and politico-institutional understanding of resilience. This has given rise to seeing the multidirectional nature of resilience trajectories, which can range from having pro-growth to pro-equity and pro-comaterialising orientations and reflect the diverse strategies pursued by a heterogeneity of housing actors involved in the post-Katrina reconstruction experiment. To capture this diversity, the concept of social resilience cells (SRCs) was developed, referring to housing providers (or policy implementers) who shape, both discursively and materially, the long-term recovery profile of post-disaster cities (Paidakaki & Moulaert 2018).

SRCs can be divided into three main categories. The first encompasses hegemonic pro-growth SRCs, which are most often represented by for-profit real estate developers who reinforce market-driven narratives of resilience and promote policy responses aligned with economic growth. In the second category, referred to as alternative pro-equity SRCs, non-profit developers link affordable housing production to broader community development strategies, seeking to embed fairness and inclusion within the recovery process. Finally, the alternative pro-comaterialising SRCs include non-profit developers who advance alternative housing tenure systems; within this category, the value of collective-building processes become evident, envisioning post-disaster rebuilding on collaborative rather than purely technical grounds (Paidakaki & Parra 2018). Importantly, alternative SRCs not only provide housing but also act as watchdogs of recovery planning and implementation processes, aiming to secure the principle of ‘housing for all’ in the city’s post-disaster long-term redevelopment (Paidakaki et al. 2022b). The differences among SRCs manifest in the ways they interpret and enact socio-spatial transformation, as well as in the answers they provide to critical questions (Gutmann 2006):

• For whom is the reconstruction?

• How should displaced residents be rehoused?

• Who should plan and implement recovery, on the basis of which civic principles and ethical commitments, and into which directions?

By engaging with these questions, SRCs directly shape the redevelopment footprint of post-disaster New Orleans, influencing which income groups (high, medium, low, very low), neighbourhoods (strategic, ghettoised, gentrified, underinvested), and types of housing (market rate, subsidised or low income) become central to recovery plans, strategies and programmes (Paidakaki et al. 2022a).

Not all SRCs exert equal influence in the contentious and institutionally diverse housing arenas. Some enjoy more institutional recognition, better access to resources, and closer alignment with political and legislative frameworks; this allows them to embed their priorities more effectively within urban planning agendas. Others, with fewer resources and weaker political leverage, struggle to have their voices heard. These asymmetries of power ultimately condition the orientation of recovery, determining which developmental values are elevated and which are contained (Paidakaki & Moulaert 2017). As illustrated by the case in New Orleans—and in post-disaster cities more broadly—resilience cannot be seen as a single trajectory but as the coexistence of multiple, sometimes competing, trajectories, constantly redefined by the interactions and tensions among heterogeneous SRCs and their institutional allies (Paidakaki & Moulaert 2018).

How, and to what extent, do the state and other institutional structures orchestrate this multiplicity of resilience trajectories and best accommodate the various housing discourses with an eye toward an equity-based, socially optimal recovery?¹ How do alternative SRCs fight for their right to ‘resilience equity’ in terms of a just redistribution of resources and cultivation of empowerment across various SRCs who rebuild different types of houses in different types of neighbourhoods for different target groups? How, in other words, is the notion of ‘rebuilding for all’ and ‘by all’ celebrated and fought for, both discursively and materially, during the long-term years of recovery with the goal of bringing all people back to rebuild their houses, neighbourhoods and livelihoods? What conditions (e.g. housing and disaster policy, urban planning, political agency, governance structure, political economy paradigm) should be in place to guide the nature, objectives and material outcomes of post-disaster recovery processes for such post-disaster egalitarian cities to be produced?

1.1 AIM AND METHODS

This synthesis paper critically re-examines and advances the concept and practice of resilience through the analytical prism of post-disaster housing politics, bottom-linked governance configurations and recovery planning in New Orleans over the first 20 years following Hurricane Katrina (2005–25). This approach integrates both theoretical and empirical components, developed in an iterative and mutually informing manner. In particular, an interdisciplinary and intertheoretical approach is employed to investigate how alternative SRCs and their networks confront persistent socio-spatial challenges—such as housing exclusion and neighbourhood underinvestment throughout long-term recovery processes. In doing so, the paper brings diverse scholarly traditions into the dialogue with each other, including housing studies, social innovation research, state and governance theory, institutional capital, planning politics, and democratic theory (Paidakaki & Moulaert 2018, Paidakaki & Parra 2018, Paidakaki et al. 2018, 2022a, 2002b). These perspectives are systematically connected to the empirical realities of New Orleans’ post-disaster trajectory. The investigation is grounded in fieldwork conducted by the author during several research visits to New Orleans (2014–15 and 2021–22), which involved a range of qualitative methods:

• semi-structured interviews with institutional actors at the federal, state and local levels, as well as think-tanks, foundations, lobbying organisations, intermediary groups, SRCs and key experts (urban specialists, architects, academics and local activists)

• a short ethnographic study of eight SRCs alongside an in-depth ethnographic engagement with three alliances of predominantly alternative SRCs

• participation in meetings

• systematic note-taking and photographic documentation

• field observations

• a review of relevant policy and planning documents.

For analytical clarity, reflections on resilience-building in New Orleans are structured around two temporal phases: the first decade of recovery (2005–15) and the second one (2015–25). This periodisation is analytically grounded in three shifts:

• recovery governance configurations

• the relative influence and capacity of different SRCs

• the transition of resilience from pro-growth rationales toward institutionalised, transformative pro-equity practices.

This two-decade framework captures a transition from a top-down, market-led recovery toward a contested, partially rebalanced governance structure where alternative SRCs play a prominent role. The analysis demonstrates that resilience is a deeply political practice: it is continuously reshaped by discourse and agency to produce varying redevelopment outcomes. To synthesise this, Figure 1 provides a schematic timeline of the recovery process, illustrating the shift from pro-growth logics toward coordinated, institutionalised pro-equity dynamics.

Figure 1

2. CONCEPTUAL AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS

3. POST-KATRINA NEW ORLEANS: DISASTER RECOVERY PROCESSES

3.1 FIRST DECADE OF RECOVERY, 2005–15

3.1.1 Initial top-down recovery approaches

As illustrated in Figure 1, the early recovery phase was characterised by the dominance of pro-growth SRCs and limited institutional capacity among alternative actors. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, recovery efforts in the Gulf Coast were guided by a series of top-down, pro-growth principles. These emphasised accountability, flexibility and creativity, largely through the promotion of tax credits and voucher programmes, the reduction of bureaucratic red tape to accelerate private sector investment, and the framing of entrepreneurial vision as the primary engine of reconstruction (Meese et al. 2005, cited in Peck 2006). Codified at the federal level through the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, these policies offered tax and financial incentives, deductions, and exemptions aimed at stimulating business investment and accelerating rebuilding (Olshansky & Johnson 2010; BondGraham 2011). By 2009, however, the National Disaster Recovery Framework (NDRF) began to incorporate social dimensions of recovery, acknowledging the critical role of non-profit organisations in post-disaster housing recovery (Paidakaki & Parra 2018).

At the state level, in October 2005, the Louisiana government established the Louisiana Recovery Administration as a business-oriented agency to oversee reconstruction. Its initial guidelines removed income targets, public benefit requirements and mechanisms for public oversight from recovery policies; in doing so, it privileged private-sector-led redevelopment (Gotham 2015). Similarly to the national level, Louisiana state agencies also increasingly recognised the contributions of alternative SRCs in the rebuilding of New Orleans, as reflected in policies such as the Louisiana Homeland Security and Emergency Assistance and Disaster Act (§ 29:726.1, 2013) (Paidakaki & Parra 2018).

Despite this shift in recognition of alternative SRCs at both administrative tiers, the financing model for low-income housing in the US remained predominantly based on leveraging mechanisms, which continued to shape post-Katrina redevelopment. This model combines limited and unstable direct subsidies administered by federal, state and local authorities with indirect expenditures, such as Low-Income Housing Tax Credits and supplementary private or charitable contributions, including corporate, faith-based and philanthropic donations, as well as mortgage instruments. Compared with direct subsidies, this approach imposes complex, time-consuming and technically demanding requirements on all SRCs. It also signalled a limited institutional commitment to combating housing exclusion or enhancing the capacities of alternative SRCs, leaving these actors consistently vulnerable to undercapitalisation and financial insecurity (Paidakaki & Parra 2018).

At the municipal level, two weeks after Katrina struck, the Mayor of New Orleans established the Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) commission whose work was organised into several committees, including a planning committee chaired by a powerful, well-connected for-profit developer. Together with the Urban Land Institute, the committee shared strategic reconstruction recommendations, prioritising areas with minimal damage for immediate rebuilding while evaluating the feasibility of reinvestment in heavily damaged neighbourhoods. The recommendations sent an ambiguous and contentious message: neighbourhoods would effectively compete for investment, signalling the possibility that the city’s recovery might favour redevelopment opportunities for pro-growth SRCs while marginalised areas risked delay or neglect. The message was further amplified through the infamous ‘green dots’ map, which visually marked areas deemed unviable for reinvestment. This representation fuelled public concern regarding the city’s projected ‘footprint’ and the potential for urban shrinkage (Olshansky & Johnson 2010). This episode demonstrates how resilience, in its early articulation, was aligned with market-oriented reconstruction priorities, privileging certain actors and geographies over others.

3.1.2 Local opposition and neighbourhood-led plans

The top-down, expert-driven recovery plan was met with resistance from New Orleans City Council, which advocated for a neighbourhood-led alternative known as the Neighborhood Planning Initiative, or the Lambert Plans. This counter-plan concentrated exclusively on the most severely flooded areas, allowing for the emergence and action of numerous alternative SRCs (Seidman 2013). However, residents in less-affected neighbourhoods felt overlooked and neglected by this plan; this led to the abandonment of the BNOB and Lambert Plans and their replacement by the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP)—an externally funded, expert-driven initiative that encouraged residents from the most severely impacted areas to relocate into planned ‘cluster developments’. This cluster strategy prioritised investment in built and social infrastructure in areas that had suffered less flood damage; it was met with resistance from residents of heavily damaged neighbourhoods, who interpreted it as a denial of resources to their communities. As a result, the UNOP failed to materialise in practice, leaving resources scattered and the city rebuilt in an ad hoc, spontaneous and highly fragmented manner (Colten et al. 2008; Paidakaki & Moulaert 2018).

3.1.3 Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance (GNOHA) and early institutional recognition

The controversy surrounding the BNOB plan catalysed a wave of civic engagement including protests, the formation of neighbourhood associations, the development of neighbourhood plans and the growth of a substantial number of alternative SRCs (Olshansky & Johnson 2010; Seidman 2013). Importantly, many of these SRCs coalesced into a movement of skilled actors, leveraging shared visioning, information dissemination and collective problem-solving. In 2007, these efforts led to the creation of the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance (GNOHA), a collaborative of primarily non-profit housing developers and community development corporations united by a shared mission: the preservation and production of affordable housing in the wake of Katrina’s devastation. GNOHA provided a platform for member organisations to exchange construction materials, assess policy efficacy and develop advocacy strategies aimed at supporting the most vulnerable populations (HousingNOLA 2015). The formation of GNOHA marks an early attempt by alternative SRCs to convert dispersed resistance into organised institutional capacity, prefiguring later shifts in the recovery trajectory. Registered as a 501(c)(4)² organisation that would allow the organisation to engage in political activities, GNOHA remained a relatively small and loosely organised coalition between 2008 and 2013, convening monthly to discuss and act on policy issues that would impact New Orleans’ recovery (Paidakaki et al. 2022a).

The growing capacity of these alternative SRCs quickly attracted the attention of institutional structures. The Enterprise Community Partnership (hereafter ‘Enterprise’), a national intermediary non-profit, established an office in New Orleans and began working exclusively with professional non-profits and landholding organisations to build affordable housing for low- and moderate-income populations affected by Katrina. Enterprise assisted alternative SRCs in accessing federal funding and advocacy channels and also became their representative voice at the federal level in Congress. Similarly, the New Orleans Office for Community Development responded to the emergent needs of alternative SRCs and requests by GNOHA by launching in 2008 the ‘soft second mortgage program’ which proved to be a crucial tool for gap financing in post-disaster housing projects (Paidakaki & Parra 2018).

3.1.4 Emerging affordable housing crisis and gentrification

Following the election of a new city administration in 2010, redevelopment strategies shifted toward a ‘place-based’ approach, targeting neighbourhoods with public and social infrastructure where public resources could be effectively combined with private investment (Paidakaki & Moulaert 2018). Concurrently, political and economic elites promoted a pro-growth, entrepreneurial vision for New Orleans, rebranding the city as a hub for film production, biosciences, software and digital technology (Gotham 2012). This rebranding, coupled with new investments, contributed to demographic shifts, rapidly increasing costs for housing (e.g. property taxes, skyrocketing rents, construction and land costs, insurance premiums) and internal displacement and gentrification (HousingNOLA 2015). Along with shrinking recovery funding over the course of the first decade, an overall insufficient housing supply, and persistent blight and vacancy, these dynamics precipitated an emerging affordable housing crisis, undermining equitable recovery and limiting the ability of all neighbourhoods and residents to fully rebuild and return.

3.1.5 HousingNOLA plan: multi-partner collaborative governance

The emergence of an affordable housing crisis and the absence of a comprehensive city-wide housing plan prompted the initiation of an inter-institutional planning process aimed at co-producing a coherent housing strategy for New Orleans for its second decade of recovery. This effort culminated in the HousingNOLA 10-Year Strategy & Implementation Plan (hereafter ‘HousingNOLA plan’) in 2014, emerging from sustained exchanges between the Foundation for Louisiana and GNOHA. GNOHA, which by that time had matured into a robust and institutionalised coalition, was supported financially through the Foundation’s Together Initiative and also politically endorsed by the city’s director of housing policy to lead a multi-partner collaborative planning process and articulate a 10-year roadmap (2015–25) for ensuring affordable, high-quality housing for all residents of New Orleans. For 16 months between August 2014 and December 2015, a wide array of actors engaged in intensive dialogues across various forums in order to co-create a housing plan that would avoid the shortcomings of previous top-down, market-driven recovery strategies that led to fragmented and ad hoc redevelopment outcomes. In particular, a wide array of actors—including non-profit and for-profit developers, public officials, financial institutions, philanthropic organisations, academics, civil rights groups, environmental advocates, and local community leaders and residents—engaged in intensive dialogues across various forums such as leadership boards, working groups and community tables (Paidakaki et al. 2022a).

The HousingNOLA plan emphasised a collective blueprint for a stronger city as a whole, treating the recovery of all neighbourhoods on the basis of equity (Paidakaki et al. 2022a). One of its central tools was the HousingNOLA neighbourhood typologies (Figure 2), a framework designed to guide policy and programmatic interventions tailored to the affordability, sustainability and accessibility requirements of individual neighbourhoods. Released on 10 December 2015, the plan identified a need for the production of 33,600 housing units to accommodate residents displaced by Katrina and established five core objectives: (1) preserve existing housing while expanding affordable rental and homeownership opportunities throughout the city; (2) monitor displacement trends and implement measures to prevent further displacement; (3) enforce and promote fair housing policies; (4) encourage sustainable design and infrastructure across neighbourhoods; and (5) increase accessibility for all residents, including those with special needs (HousingNOLA 2015).

Figure 2

The HousingNOLA plan represents a critical moment of scalar and institutional consolidation, enabling alternative SRCs to shift from reactive, localised practices toward coordinated, city-wide policy engagement.

3.2 SECOND DECADE OF RECOVERY, 2015–25

3.2.1 Advocacy, electoral engagement and resilience redefined

The first post-disaster decade was defined by fragmented contestation and pro-growth logics. In contrast, the second decade was defined by alternative SRCs scaling up and becoming more politically sophisticated as they became embedded within governance structures. As shown in Figure 1, this gradual rebalancing allowed these SRCs to consolidate institutional capital and exert greater influence over rebuilding agendas, despite the structural constraints that persisted.

In 2015, the HousingNOLA plan charted a forward-looking trajectory toward proactive, long-term housing policy for the second decade of reconstruction (HousingNOLA 2015). Over the course of this decade, the HousingNOLA plan evolved into a multilinked platform through which alternative SRCs, GNOHA and local communities engaged institutional structures to address issues such as gentrification, internal displacement and the persistent shortage of affordable rental housing; to allocate funding more efficiently and equitably; and to introduce and institutionalise alternative housing finance mechanisms, including Housing Trust Funds. Annual updates to the plan throughout 2025 positioned the HousingNOLA plan as GNOHA’s central advocacy instrument, while both alliances—GNOHA and HousingNOLA—assumed the role of watchdogs overseeing the plan’s implementation (Paidakaki et al. 2022b).

GNOHA and HousingNOLA partners acted decisively to ensure adherence to the plan’s objectives amidst shrinking federal housing resources. Their interventions included challenging amendments to the Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance that would restrict multifamily housing in historic districts; participating in budget and public hearings of the Housing Authority of New Orleans and the Louisiana Housing Corporation; advocating for the adoption of affordable housing impact statements; proposing amendments to the master plan; and engaging with the state legislature to promote Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (Paidakaki et al. 2022b). To maintain accountability during election cycles, GNOHA evaluated candidates on housing policy via scorecards and mobilised voter engagement through the #PutHousingFirst platform and campaign launched in 2017 to hold candidates accountable. The platform also stayed vigilant in public policy advocacy through calls-to-action efforts throughout the year, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was reactivated to lay out the framework for a proper pandemic response with specific housing demands (e.g. immediate rental assistance, residential and commercial mortgage payments deferrals, inclusion of housing funds into the federal emergency relief packages). To bolster influence at the state level and support statewide housing initiatives, GNOHA facilitated the launch of HousingLOUISIANA in 2019, a network of regional housing alliances spanning Baton Rouge, Alexandria, Lafayette, Shreveport, North Shore, Lake Charles and Monroe/Houma-Thibodaux. In subsequent years, similar alliances were established in California, North Carolina and Tennessee—directly supported by HousingNOLA staff—contributing to the creation of a national network of like-minded housing coalitions that is now active in 12 states.

Over the decade, HousingNOLA expanded its analytical and advocacy focus to highlight social vulnerability, structural racism, housing and climate inequities, and the need for equitable and transparent governance structures to guide redevelopment. This evolution in their focus, analysis and narrative was manifested in several way. First, they refined the plan’s neighbourhood typology through the Golden Pearl neighbourhood typology and its associated indicators, creating a reference framework for evidence-based policymaking, which ranked neighbourhoods in terms of socio-economic vulnerability and assessed racial equity to capture nuances in community needs, inform housing policy decisions, and guide the allocation of funds for rental and homeownership programmes (Figure 3). Concomitantly, the organisation’s understanding of resilience evolved. They no longer defined resilience merely as the capacity of individuals or communities to endure disruption in times of crisis. Instead, they understood it as the presence of protective systems, safety nets and equitable, sustainable growth that ensures housing affordability while stabilising vulnerable populations (HousingNOLA 2022). Hurricane Ida (2021) was pivotal to their reconceptualisation of resilience, as it caused widespread destruction, displacement and fatalities—underscoring the importance of systemic resilience and equitable protection.

Figure 3

To pursue systemic change, GNOHA invested in organising communities and mobilising voters to counter policy inertia (#PutHousingFirst campaigns), advocated for accountable and equitable relationships with decision-makers—who, as recipients of public funds, are expected to engage with the affected communities, build up trust with them and think through their engagement in the design of their housing policy—and made a plea for closing the racial wealth gap through the delivery of housing justice and racial equity. Equitable housing provision was framed as a means to address systemic disparities in housing policy, including historical and structural disadvantages affecting African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, marginalised Asian Americans and economically disadvantaged Caucasians, whose neighbourhoods often remain undervalued and under-resourced in the face of disasters.

3.2.2 Challenges in implementation

Despite the aspirational goals of the HousingNOLA plan and the political agency of the two alliances, the plan’s implementation was consistently underperformed due to inadequate institutional responses. By 2022, the alliance updated the plan with the release of the Housing for All Action Plan, raising the estimated housing need from 33,600 to 47,000 units and projecting a cost of US$37 billion to close the racial wealth gap, ensure affordability and build a resilient housing system in New Orleans. Nevertheless, housing production remained limited: in 2023, fewer than 3,000 units were completed, and between September 2023 and August 2024, only 200 new affordable units were added (HousingNOLA 2015, 2024); however, this stagnation prompted a significant policy shift in November 2024, when 75% of New Orleans voters approved a charter amendment mandating a permanent 2% annual allocation from the city’s general fund to establish a Housing Trust Fund projected to leverage over US$1 billion for long-term affordability (Whetten 2025).

The alliance systematically documented this underperformance through annual report cards. In 2016, the city received a ‘B’ grade, reflecting moderate progress with the production of 1,439 affordable homes. In 2017, a ‘C’ grade was issued, acknowledging only 488 new units and insufficient policy implementation. By 2018, persistent inadequacies led to a ‘D’ grade, which was repeated in 2019. In 2020, with only 1,594 units netted and critical initiatives such as Smart Housing Mix and the Healthy Homes Ordinance unaddressed, the city received its first failing grade, ‘F’, which persisted through 2025, demonstrating the systemic challenges of translating strategic planning into tangible equitable housing outcomes. Addressing a decade of underperformance, the 2025 Housing for All Investment Plan marks a 20th-anniversary strategic pivot. It integrates public and private funding to tackle four pillars: cost burdens, the racial wealth gap, resilience and displacement.

4. CONCLUSIONS: REIMAGING RESILIENCE FOR EGALITARIAN POST-DISASTER CITIES

This paper demonstrates that post-disaster resilience is a contested, politically mediated process shaped by heterogeneous SRCs in asymmetric institutional terrains. It makes three theoretical contributions. First, it reconceptualises resilience as a dual discursive-material process mediated by SRCs. Second, it uses SRCs as an analytical lens through which to capture diverse recovery trajectories. Third, it frames institutional capital as a dynamic resource that determines an actor’s ability to influence resilience outcomes. When resilience is analytically examined specifically through the lens of long-term post-disaster housing reconstruction processes, a set of new critical parameters emerges, emphasising the need to refine the concept to better reflect on-the-ground realities. These parameters centre on power dynamics within recovery narratives, which shape the relative accommodation of different housing tools and strategies.

The framework of SRCs was developed during fieldwork research in New Orleans as a way to make sense of the heterogeneous manifestations of social resilience within housing systems. This lens is useful for examining recovery across multiple phases, the role of bottom-linked institutional ties and governance configurations, the embedding of housing struggles within broader political economy paradigms, and the diverse strategies, forms of agency and resilience trajectories pursued by housing actors. Beyond New Orleans, the SRC framework provides a transferable tool for examining resilience in diverse crisis contexts. It allows researchers to map actor configurations and identify power asymmetries. It also helps trace how institutional capital shapes recovery trajectories across different socio-spatial settings.

The utility of this framework becomes evident when examining how contemporary housing systems prioritise financialised disaster response over the restoration of homes. By focusing on property as a financial asset rather than a community foundation, these systems reinforce a pro-growth orientation—both material and symbolic—that actively sidelines alternative visions. Crucially, this logic conflates use and exchange values: it advances the interests of pro-growth SRCs and their coalitions while at the same time marginalising oppositional forces. Reconstruction becomes a political arena where SRCs contest both dominant narratives—whether pro-growth, pro-equity or pro-comaterialising—and the scope of entitlements available for innovative experimentation in housing recovery. Alternative SRCs resist pro-growth recovery rationales through discursive and material practices informed by equity and solidarity. Resilient cities, therefore, emerge as socio-spatial and political arenas in which diverse SRCs continuously shape rebuilding trajectories and reconstruction geographies. These actors recombine discursive and material practices, leveraging inter-institutional interactions to imagine and materialise urban environments that reflect the development aspirations of their own and of the broader citizenry.

In New Orleans, the first decade of recovery was characterised by a dynamic interplay of enduring pro-growth trajectories, conflicting discourses, top-down strategies and spontaneous, locally driven initiatives. This interaction fostered a culture of uncertainty and adversity within the reconstruction process, producing a piecemeal and fragmented development trajectory and outcome. Yet, it also provided space for alternative SRCs to assert their rights, implement strategic interventions, and collaborate with each other and institutional structures to influence recovery outcomes. Through these efforts, alternative SRCs were able to counteract some of the predetermined pro-growth trajectories, reshape local housing governance, and initiate pro-equity and pro-comaterialising resilience trajectories. The decade witnessed the governance fermentations leading to GNOHA, which represented the accumulation of endogenous institutional capital, and the genesis of the HousingNOLA alliance, which embodies exogenous institutional capital. This period also saw a partial opening of institutional structures to social experimentation and engagement with alternative SRCs, sowing the seeds of neo-welfare practices, despite the increasingly constrained availability of funding.

The simultaneous cultivation of endogenous and exogenous institutional capital, exemplified by the formation of GNOHA, HousingNOLA and HousingLOUISIANA in the second recovery decade, was a prerequisite for envisioning and reconstructing a more egalitarian New Orleans. Politically astute and well-organised alternative SRCs invigorated their institutional capital by reorganising themselves, navigating and challenging administrative and political rigidities, scaling out their advocacy, radicalising narratives, broadening their political claims, escalating their ambitions toward national-scale influence, and consolidating their influence through deeper community engagement and grassroots support. They aimed to cultivate a radicalised ‘neo-welfare’ state: a yet-to-be-fully-realised institutional framework capable of hosting co-implementation processes where public subsidies are sufficient and distributed equitably across SRCs, neighbourhoods and social groups, and where a diverse array of financially viable housing solutions are deliberated and made available for heterogeneous urban neighbourhoods. The effectiveness of such co-implementation is conditioned by several factors, e.g. the sustained presence of politically active alternative SRCs in institutional arenas; the proliferation of housing alliances across territories; and their connection to constituencies. When these conditions are met, a ‘neo-political’ and ‘neo-democratic’ bottom-linked governance framework becomes a necessary precondition for building egalitarian cities. HousingNOLA thus exemplifies the inherently political nature of recovery plan implementation and provides a model for SRCs worldwide to engage in planning processes as a means of democratising urban governance.

Nonetheless, the persistent underperformance of HousingNOLA illustrates the limitations of co-implementation in achieving the full societal ambition of egalitarian urbanism. Existing housing policies, programmatic constraints, inadequate institutional responses and enduring profit-oriented paradigms in housing systems continue to restrict the development of socially equitable cities. These structural limitations include reductions in federal funding for subsidised housing, a reliance on market-based recovery strategies and temporal inconsistencies in political support. Collectively, these factors undermine the productivity of institutional frameworks, constraining the capacity to deliver sufficient, equitable and resilient housing for all.

Against this backdrop, the post-Katrina experience shows how narrow, rigid, pro-growth paradigms constrain the full realisation of resilience ambitions. Achieving these ambitions requires governance structures in which the state actively democratises both itself and the economy; this entails substantial social investments, comprehensive legislative reforms, and revisions to housing and tax and insurance policies, as well as the expansion of alternative housing provision propositions. Rather than entirely rejecting neoliberal policies, this approach advocates for a ‘middle-ground’ development pathway that builds on existing path dependencies while simultaneously exploring and implementing new, inclusive trajectories. It supports the fair allocation of resources to alternative institutionalised markets, including community development organisations, housing cooperatives, community land trusts, and incremental housing initiatives, to test and reinforce diverse resilience strategies.

Long-term research in New Orleans also reveals that resilience emerges in diverse and sometimes unexpected ways, forming a heterogeneous societal story of substance over form in post-disaster housing systems. Such resilience emerges when recovery processes embrace alternative visions of the state and value systems rooted in mutuality, reciprocity and social solidarity—practices that can address systemic market failures in housing provision while giving communities a meaningful role in shaping their own recovery. In practice, this entails embedding social justice principles to support multiple, context-sensitive resilience trajectories, promoting effectuation processes that enable incremental, locally tailored, and co- or hetero-produced reconstruction plans, and recognising the catalytic contributions of all SRCs—both hegemonic and alternative—across neighbourhoods with differing socio-economic and infrastructural characteristics. It also involves providing assistance to all impacted households, particularly the most vulnerable populations—including low-income residents, women, single parents, the elderly, migrants, people with disabilities, and communities of colour—ensuring substantial, timely and equitable public funding responsive to changing local needs, and fostering sustainable, equitable relationships between decision- and policymakers and communities, so that context-specific housing policies are informed by the lived realities of both housing providers and the residents they aim to serve.

Finally, the case of New Orleans demonstrates that post-disaster resilience is inherently political, negotiated and multidirectional. Alternative SRCs, over the course of two decades and through alliance-building, bottom-linked governance and advocacy, have partially redirected predetermined pro-growth recovery trajectories, providing housing for the most vulnerable, advancing socially equitable housing and democratising recovery planning.

From a policy perspective, a just recovery takes more than technical planning. It depends on institutions that shift resources and genuinely open space for alternative actors within bottom-linked forms of governance. The experience of New Orleans offers lessons for other cities, highlighting the importance of sustained bottom-linked interactions, the creation and strengthening of institutional capital in housing systems, continuous institutional engagement, and political mobilisation as mechanisms for advancing more equitable post-disaster recovery. Post-Katrina New Orleans exhibits that resilience-building does not occur in an institutional vacuum. Institutional structures, by engaging with politically active SRCs, transform their roles in the recovery process, becoming instrumental in redirecting resilience trajectories. Understanding the nature and drivers of dynamic institutional transformations allows us to assess how ethically sound and productive recovery legislation and regulatory frameworks influence reconstruction practices, guiding them toward outcomes that serve the broader social good. Ultimately, the case of New Orleans shows that resilience becomes transformative only when it is politically contested and backed by institutions in ways that are socially grounded in struggles for equity and justice.

DATA ACCESSIBILITY

The research data underlying this study are not publicly available due to confidentiality agreements with the participants. The findings draw on in-depth qualitative conversations conducted under assurances of anonymity and privacy protection. Making full transcripts or recordings available would risk breaching these ethical commitments.

ETHICAL APPROVAL

The research conducted between 2021 and 2022 as part of the postdoctoral project was approved by the Social and Societal Ethics Committee (SMEC) of KU Leuven (reference number G-2021-3904-R2(MIN)).