"If You Did Not Grow Up Here, You Cannot Appreciate Living Here": Neoliberalism, Space-time, and Affect in Post-Katrina Recovery Planning

In post-Katrina New Orleans, local government officials have represented neighborhood recovery planning as a mechanism of shared governance, where all residents can participate as collective authors of the city's reconstruction directive. In these representations, expert planners were described as professional facilitators who served the primary role of documenting and giving a common format to resident ideas about urban recovery. Contrary to these official representations, this article shows how neighborhood recovery planning for the city's centrally located 4th planning district was characterized by significant tensions between professional planners' visions of urban development and resident notions of neighborhood and community. The article makes the case that the anthropological literature on the social production of space, time, and affect provides us with a resourceful vantage point for understanding what is at stake in the different ways New Orleanians and professional planners envisioned urban recovery and offers analytical resources for negotiating these differences.