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On this slide,
you should see a map,
an image of New
Orleans, Louisiana,
and this is really
where my research
into this field began.
Back in 2005, I moved down to
New Orleans with my
family from Boston,
and we had six
very good weeks in
New Orleans from July
until August of 2005.
Unfortunately, at the end
of August, on the 28th,
Hurricane Katrina arrived
and destroyed the city.
It, of course, flooded our home,
the homes of our neighbors
and our neighborhood,
our car, all of our paper
records, and my hard drive.
Pretty much everything
that we owned materially
was destroyed in that flood.
In the process that followed,
I began thinking about these
questions of what factors
drive recovery and resilience
after a major shock.
This image that you see
right now comes from
the work of my colleague
Rick Wheel and I.
We began to go to the
city of New Orleans after
the flood and ask people
who lived there a
very simple question.
On a scale of 1 to 5,
how has the recovery
gone for you?
We collected data
for about a year
after the hurricane passed.
This map has three
types of data, then.
Of course, it's a map, it has
geographic data on the South,
that Blue Oxbow shaped thing-
that's the Mississippi River;
on the north- that's
the Lake Pontchartrain.
My house was on Canal Boulevard.
It's the north-south
road on the west side.
But, we also added flood
depth information.
The background colors
in the map show
how much water was in
homes and businesses
across New Orleans.
In the very light areas in
the south in Jefferson
Parish, for example,
there are fewer than two feet of
water in the darker yellow areas
in Plaquemines and Uptown we
had 2 to 4 feet of water.
In the lighter blue areas,
we see 4 to 7 feet of water
and in the darker blue areas,
most of the map, had
seven-plus feet of water.
Finally, we added
the responses of
those individuals that we spoke
to after Hurricane Katrina.
The red, orange, yellow,
and green dots
show the responses
from those thousand or so
people that we spoke to.
I expected to find across
New Orleans that where
we had more water,
that is to say, darker blue
colors in the background,
we would find more red,
which was not recoveries.
The reality was,
though, in fact,
even in the very light areas
in the south where there
was not much water,
there are a number
of individuals who
told us things were
not going well,
and in the darkest blue areas,
we see whole communities telling
us things are green
or doing really well.
This, for me, was one
of the first hints
that recovery and resilience in
the context of
disaster do not come
only from the power of
the disaster itself.
That is to say, the amount
of water in the background
or the height of the wave of
a tsunami, or the power
of an earthquake.
Those factors, I would argue,
are not what drive
recovery and resilience.
Instead, it's the
social connections
that we have with each other.
Now, on this map itself,
you can see clusters
of responses,
especially in the
northeast quadrant there.
That's the geological rest area.
All of the spots,
as you can see,
are almost all green.
That community came
back early, as there is
a community centered around
the Catholic Church there,
were very strong ethnic and
religious ties to each other,
and they're a good example of
the social ties I'll be
talking about in a second.
Again, the core
argument in this talk
today is that social capital,
the ties that bind us,
are a critical element to
measure precisely because of
the role they play in
resilience and recovery.
The next slide shows an image
