The romance and reality of creativity in New Orleans' post-Katrina rebuilding
Description
The “creative city” is a cross-disciplinary concept with competing and contradictory meanings and applications. This dissertation responds to scholarly calls for situated analyses of creative city making and contributes to collective understanding of how multiple conceptualizations of the creative city manifest, collide, and intertwine in practice within a specific place and time: New Orleans in the decade following Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures (2005-2015). In the wake of disaster, every resident was called upon to “be creative” in rebuilding the city, yet stakeholders understood and operationalized creativity in different ways. The primary research question asks: what happens in the transmutation of the creative city as it morphs between theoretical concept, rhetorical ideal, and practical strategy? The study design is a multi-method qualitative analysis using document analysis and interviews. I first describe the role of creativity in rebuilding efforts as understood and expressed by elected officials, artists, cultural producers, activists, and rebuilding professionals. Findings from this part of the analysis demonstrate significant differences between stakeholder groups, but also surprising moments of coalescence. Within this broader inquiry, I then focus on an embedded case study of the 2012-2014 Lots of Progress pitch competitions, a program spearheaded by New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA) in partnership with the nonprofit incubator Propeller, in which vacant lots were offered as the prize for the most creative concepts for their reuse. Here, I answer the research question: when the offer to remake the city through creativity is left open to all, what ideas and values are brought forth? The case study is an example of the powerful and contradictory discourse of creativity. Program organizers and participants were generally aligned in their dual understanding of creativity both as resistance to an unsatisfactory status quo, and as the ability to transform social problems into development opportunities to be solved through entrepreneurship. In the concluding chapter, insights take the form of recommendations and some thoughts on future praxis in the field: (1) rethinking the pitch competition format and purpose, (2) planning and policy to support New Orleans’ cultural ecosystem, and (3) implications for the evolving field of creative placemaking.