Houses of the future in New Orleans?

A photo by Wayne Troyer of a Make It Right home under construction, in 2008. Originally posted at Jimmy Stamp's Life Without Buildings blog

In The Atlantic, Wayne Curtis explains that the disastrous failure of all levels of government to plan and rebuild New Orleans is having some interesting unintended positive consequences.

Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city’s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) […]

In the absence of strong central leadership, the rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects. And this has turned New Orleans—moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems to allow almost anything to propagate—into something of a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life. An assortment of foundations, church groups, academics, corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, young people with big ideas, and architects on a mission have been working independently to rebuild the city’s neighborhoods, all wholly unconcerned about the missing master plan. It’s at once exhilarating and frightening to behold. […]

Special post 3: Festivals and urban cultural policy: Some meditations on the literature

Okay, so apologies for another long break from posting – I’ve been in Sydney, interviewing the Sydney Festival’s Lindy Hume for Meanjin Quarterly and aso catching up with my colleagues at the University of Western Sydney and NewMatilda.com.

I’m going to make it up to you all today with a long post on the literature of urban cultural policy as it relates to festivals.  This will be the final post in my “special series” on academic festivals literature, which has been a lot of fun to read up on. It’s another fascinating area of the knowledge base, and while I could spend days delving into it, I am going to discuss the literature in general before examining a couple of specific papers.