The new NOBC

As a card carrying member of the great uncouth, unwashed, lazy, malcontent, and often drunken citizenry of NOLA I am naturally suspicious of all city planning and planners. But I will say that it's probably slightly better to have a professional (albeit a political careerist professional) planner run the New Orleans Building Corp. than the previous practice of allowing a developer to run it.

If you are unfamiliar with Kristina Ford, you may profit from watching this hour long talk she gave at MIT about the challenges facing New Orleans in October of 2005. She says some good things as well as some things that I construe as naive, patronizing and condescending toward poor and working people but that's pretty typical of her ilk anyway.

Also during the talk she mentions her plans to write a new book about planning in New Orleans which was just published a few months ago. I bought a copy at the book table during this year's Rising Tide but haven't gotten a chance to start reading it yet.