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On this slide, you
should see a map.
An image of New
Orleans, Louisiana.
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, around the 28th,
Hurricane Katrina arrived
and destroyed the city.
It, of course, flooded
our home, the homes of
of our neighbors and our
neighborhood, our car,
all of our paper
records, 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 Weil and I.
We began to go through
the city of New Orleans
after the flood and ask
people who lived there
a very simple question.
On a scale of 1-5,
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 shape is
the Mississippi River.
On the north, that's
Lake Pontchartrain.
My house was on Canal Boulevard.
It's the north-south
road in 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.
The very light
areas in the south,
in Jefferson Parish,
for example,
there were fewer than
two feet of water.
In the darker yellow areas
in Plaquemines and uptown,
we had 2-4 feet of water.
In the lighter blue areas,
we see 4-7 feet of water,
and the darker blue
areas, most of the map,
had 7+ feet of water.
Finally, we added the
responses of those individuals
that we spoke to after
Hurricane Katrina.
Those red, orange,
yellow and green dots
show the responses from
those thousand or so
people that we spoke to.
Now I expected to find,
across New Orleans,
that where we had more water,
that is to say, darker blue
colors in the background,
we'd find more red
or 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.
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 a 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 to 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 a community,
centered around the
Catholic Church there
with very strong ethnic
and religious ties
to each other and
they're a good example
of the kind of 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.
