The analysis of the visions for a sustainable New Orleans region from both planning and policy documents and from stakeholder perspectives has revealed a great diversity of goals and priorities for a sustainable region. However, the ultimate goal of this section is to integrate this highly diverse set of ideals into a common outlook for the region’s path to sustainable development. To that end, I brought together these goals and priorities into the Community Capital Framework and blended all three into a Common Vision for Greater New Orleans. Below I describe how these three vision phases were integrated into a unified portrait of the New Orleans region.
The first step was to supplement the pre-existing visions with enriched detail from the perspectives of stakeholders. Though many pre-existing visions have much in common with stakeholder priorities, sometimes with very obvious parallels between proponents of Ecocity, for example, and recommendations in the Master Plan, the interviews allowed for the themes introduced by these documents to be drawn out and enlivened. This comparison showed how insights from the Master Plan could be enriched by priorities such as the need to democratize sustainability, how the New Orleans Index could deepen its emphasis on equity by discussing it not only in material terms but also in the cultural and psychological context of healing communities. The Inflection Point vision’s contributions of entrepreneurship and brain gain acquired new
depth in the perspectives of stakeholders who spoke of the many kinds of entrepreneurs in New Orleans and how training talented people should occur in high-growth sectors as well as marginalized neighbourhoods. The Impact Economy ideal was enlivened by comparisons of New Orleans to other cities where a new relationship between business and the community had been achieved.
After integrating pre-existing and stakeholder visions, the next phase in creating a common vision involved channelling these priorities into the Community Capital Framework. As discussed in Section 2, the Community Capital Tool creates a vision for sustainable community development based on balance between the six forms of community capital and the locally created priorities that encompass them at the community or regional level (Dagevos, 2011). That vision is articulated locally by identifying long-term goals, or requirements, that represent the top priorities for maintaining or enhancing stocks of community capital in a balanced manner. In order to integrate the priorities emerging from the documents and stakeholder perspectives that have been discussed, I assessed them for the forms of community capital that they related to and how their various goals could be translated into requirements in the Tool.
Overall, the goals from pre-existing and stakeholder visions were relatively comprehensive in representing the various forms of community capital. Their integrated priorities covered the 20 stocks of community capital with adequate detail, although many capitals and stocks received more attention than others. However, this comprehensiveness was only possible by integrating the visions. At the level of the visions themselves, there was a large variation in how well the six community capitals were represented. Pre-existing visions such as the Master Plan and the New Orleans Index achieved a relatively high level of comprehensiveness, focusing on all six capitals and giving most at least a moderate level of attention. However, the Inflection Point vision focused solely on human and economic capital, although it contributed valuable priorities to those areas. The same variation in comprehensiveness occurred in the stakeholder visions. The most comprehensive vision, Healing and Learning, highly emphasized all capitals, while Governance and Ethics only focused strongly on social and cultural capital. However, the low comprehensiveness of some visions did not
to build the requirements. This process is what occurred in the third and final phase of constructing the Common Vision.
The final step leading up to the Common Vision was to interpret the goals emerging from pre-existing and stakeholder visions into the Community Capital Tool. In order to create a final set of requirements to guide the vision of a sustainable New Orleans region, I turned to the basic requirements, a list of 50 general goals that the Tool offers as guidelines for identifying locally relevant requirements. Please refer to Appendix B for a list of these requirements. For each of the 20 stocks of community capital, the basic requirements provided a general starting point that could then be enriched by the detail of the visions that have been identified. In this process, each basic requirement transformed into a dynamic fusion of goals and values from stakeholder priorities and documents. To illustrate an example of how this process occurred, I will return to the example of storm water management. The basic requirement most relevant to this issue states “preservation of existing reservoirs and replenishment through natural processes” under groundwater. Turning to the pre-existing visions, I considered the Master Plan’s emphasis on a resilient city and the Impact Economy principle of Design, as well as key stakeholder priorities from the Water Steward vision highlighting the need to integrate sustainable water management principles into public space and infrastructure, eventually creating a requirement which read “Regional water infrastructure is working towards a more sustainable integrated water management system”. Consulting with the documents and interviews in the same way, this process yielded a set of 60 requirements.
However, these requirements represented only my interpretation of the Common Vision for regional sustainability, necessitating the need to incorporate community review into the process. To that end, I presented a draft list of these requirements to community members, some of which were participants in interviews, in the workshop in October 2012 and collected electronic feedback afterwards. The feedback that emerged from this process gave many suggestions, as well as validation of the existing draft goals that I had presented. The incorporation of these perspectives yielded a final list of requirements. In Figure 6 this process of community review is represented.
Figure 6. Incorporating Community Review into the Long Term Requirements.