Steering New Orleans’s Recovery With a Clinical Eye

NEW ORLEANS, April 9 — In a city fond of its own self-portrait, Edward J. Blakely’s opinions are a shot of cold water.

Dr. Blakely, New Orleans’s belatedly appointed Hurricane Katrina recovery chief, refers to the city’s racial factions as “a bit like the Shiites and Sunnis,” calls the civic elite “insular,” and says the newcomers he wants to draw here will be impatient with local “buffoons.” But unlike other outsiders who come here dispersing critical thoughts, Dr. Blakely might see his bear fruit. For one thing, Dr. Blakely, a globe-trotting academic with a long résumé, has a mandate for renewal from Mayor C. Ray Nagin and a city desperate for leadership.

For another, a cool mix of realism and fatalism is, to all evidence, guiding him three months into his tenure as the executive director of this city’s Office of Recovery Management. In a city government where hot speechmaking, unfulfilled promises and finger-pointing have reigned, the combination stands out. It was evident in the latest recovery plan, hatched by Dr. Blakely and unveiled last month, and widely praised as the most practicable yet.

Dr. Blakely, the former dean of the school of management and urban policy at the New School in New York, may prove to be what has been damagingly lacking here: a firm voice making difficult choices between neighborhoods. He is the latest incarnation of what has become a stock character in the New Orleans saga, the rescuer from afar — but one with an unusually candid streak.

Those who demand a “right to return” for former residents are merely “using people” for political ends, Dr. Blakely said sharply in an interview. The “lower-income population” now “trapped outside the city” may not be coming back. New Orleans “won’t be the same” when the dust settles, he asserted calmly, suggesting that a new population with more “energy” may replace the old.

Out of these perceptions has come his plan, presented at City Hall late last month by Dr. Blakely, a soft-spoken but precise professor. It bows to political realities in New Orleans without indulging them, in contrast with its several forerunners. The plan focuses on rebuilding 17 compact areas a half-mile in diameter and proposes spending on a few symbolic areas of devastation, like the Lower Ninth Ward in the heavily damaged eastern section, pleasing activists who have strongly urged their redevelopment.

But 14 of the 17 areas Dr. Blakely singles out are in the more promising, less flooded western part of the city. A combination of incentives for developers and public infrastructure spending will be used to rebuild these spots, Dr. Blakely says, at a cost of $1.1 billion, money that is not yet in hand and that is dependent in part on an unusual plan to sell bonds based on the money the city might get from its acres of blighted properties.

“He has brought a level of realism to rebuilding New Orleans that hasn’t been there,” said Sean Reilly, a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. “He’s got a real, concrete plan. At the end of the day, that’s what’s been missing: that clear prioritization, ‘here’s where we’re going to invest.’ ”

The plan appears to have the support, provisionally at least, of the mutually suspicious political factions here. Above all, it is backed by Dr. Blakely’s own appraisal of the pathologies that have so far stymied recovery in this city’s wounded neighborhoods.

After he was appointed by the mayor, Dr. Blakely, 68, stepped into a planning vacuum in New Orleans. He quickly surprised state officials with a demand for control of recovery dollars, proclaimed his own indispensability and publicly chided New Orleans for what he termed its “mendicants” mentality.

Colleagues elsewhere say this egotism is at least partly justified: Dr. Blakely has held a series of prestigious university positions, has a track record of helping cities recover — notably Oakland, Calif., after the 1989 earthquake and fire — and has written well-received studies in urban planning, especially a critical look at gated communities in America. At the University of California, Berkeley, where he headed the urban planning department, he brought the university’s resources to bear on Oakland’s problems in an innovative way, colleagues say; he is chairman of urban and regional planning at the University of Sydney, Australia, and commutes between New Orleans and Sydney.

“Given a near-hopeless task, this is as good a choice as I could have come up with,” said Lawrence J. Vale, head of the department of urban studies and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Heavyweight credentials notwithstanding, state officials balked at Dr. Blakely’s demand to control some of the recovery money, though they later came to an understanding with him. Dr. Blakely said he was undeterred by the obstacles.

“I’m like the doctor, going into surgery,” he said. “I’m putting my best thing there. The patient, I hope, lives. But post-surgery, the patient, if they start eating hog maws again and not exercising, what can I do? I approach all my urban planning projects that way.”

It is too early to say whether Dr. Blakely will succeed where others have failed, and he recently said he might leave his post in a year. But what is clear is that, perhaps for the first time, a ranking New Orleans official is looking out over the ruins and their complicated context with a clinical, outsider’s eye.

That awareness of entrenched realities here, racial and economic, is reflected in Dr. Blakely’s relatively modest plan: it is not an effort to make over the city all at once. Instead, it revolves around localized attention to promising zones that, if they take off, could have a transforming effect on the whole. “If I could pump life back in these places, you might pump life back into the entire city,” he said.

The picture in its entirety is too daunting to be tackled completely. Most acutely, Dr. Blakely has found a polarized racial environment in New Orleans, very different from Oakland, that he says he must work around rather than try to change. Here, race is “the first thing in people’s minds,” said Dr. Blakely, who is black. “It’s a culture of domination rather than participation. So whatever group gets something, they try to dominate the whole turf.”

A second entrenched hurdle is the paper-thin economy. If it is not built up — essentially created wholesale, most promisingly on hopes of redeveloping a downtown medical and bioscience complex here — all of Dr. Blakely’s exercises could be for naught.

“We have an economy entirely made up of T-shirts,” he said in a speech at the University of Sydney this week. “That is our major import and export.”

He sees the moribund economic infrastructure as the result, in part, of the city’s provincialism.

“It’s quite interesting how insular people are here,” Dr. Blakely said. “They don’t know people on Wall Street, they don’t know the big development firms, they’ve not been associated with the kind of urban planning expertise that I take for granted.”

The tone is clipped and California, different from the easygoing drawl of local officials. Dr. Blakely’s skepticism about New Orleans caused a stir last week when he suggested that the city’s prehurricane population levels might have been inflated. He later backed down and apologized after Mayor Nagin disagreed.

Still, the city has a few aces, and Dr. Blakely is banking on them, most notably a “very good” university network of five substantial institutions, and a way of life that cannot be replicated elsewhere.

Newcomers, pioneers willing to put up with the city’s present difficulties, could be the salvation of New Orleans and its future, Dr. Blakely suggested. New Orleans now is “a third-world country,” he said.

“If we get some people here, those 100 million new Americans, they’re going to come here without the same attitudes of the locals,” he said. “I think, if we create the right signals, they’re going to come here, and they’re going to say, ‘Who are these buffoons?’ I’m meeting some who are moving here, and they don’t have time for this stuff.”