Gentilly Resilience District

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Image Credits: Stantec

Ten years after the flooding following Hurricane Katrina devastated the New Orleans neighborhood of Gentilly, the city won a federal grant to implement a suite of projects demonstrating a new approach to “living with water,” including extensive investments in green infrastructure, public arts, and job training. The Gentilly Resilience District (GRD) proposal aimed to advance equitable resilience by reducing flood vulnerability in a middle- and working-class Black majority neighborhood and creating a new green infrastructure workforce to ensure that low-income residents benefit from infrastructure investments. Seven years after the initial award, very few projects from the GRD have started construction, delayed by shifting political leadership and COVID-19. Drawing on site visits as well as interviews with both participants and critics, we assess the GRD’s ambitious agenda and implementation struggles, which reveal important lessons about the possibilities and limitations of competition-driven, top-down infrastructure projects.