View
468
Download
0
Category
Tags:
Preview:
DESCRIPTION
Presentation by Mary W. Rowe of the New Orleans Institute to the Chief of Staff Retreat convened by the Mercatus Center, Philadelphia, February 21, 2009
Citation preview
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
Recommended