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This chapter examines the dynamics of rebuilding in one of the most devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward, after Hurricane Katrina and how this area has become a laboratory for architectural experimentation. In particular, it looks at Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation, a private sector effort to rebuild homes and lives in the Lower Ninth Ward, and how it evolved as a powerful voice of neighborhood preservation and racial justice at a moment when it appeared that the Lower Ninth Ward would remain vacant due to the lack of investment and support from the city’s elite. It also considers the efforts of Make It Right supporters to defend black residents’ “right of return” and to encourage the use of green building technologies, and argues that this project and the individual homes it has constructed are charming manifestations of the new landscape of neoliberal urbanism where the right to affordable housing and flood protection is determined by market forces as well as individual access to technological/architectural remedies.

This chapter examines the technological transformation of the flood-damaged Holy Cross, a subdistrict of the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina. Using insights gleaned from science and technology studies, including a version of “laboratory studies” as developed by Bruno Latour, it considers the dynamics of Holy Cross’s remarkable post-Katrina transition from devastated neighborhood to a beacon of sustainability and green architecture. Latour’s version of laboratory studies is an applied methodological approach to track emerging technoscience innovation and transfer on-the-ground; it is demonstrative of the application of another broader theoretical and methodological approach that was also developed in part by him—actor-network theory. The chapter calls for “just sustainability” that combines traditional sustainability and environmental justice goals—in particular, “the need for distributed environmental goods and harms to all regardless of race or class”.

This chapter presents the story of Katrina survivor Glenda Jones Stevenson Harris. As a longtime resident of Lower Ninth Ward, Glenda witnessed the decline of her neighborhood in the face of drugs, crime, and poverty. She dedicated herself to reversing that decline: one year before Katrina’s landfall, she became the ward’s first advocacy director. Among Glenda’s many self-assigned tasks was to study and strategize how to evacuate the Lower Nine in case of a hurricane. Glenda was also a member of the first training session mounted by the Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston project.