Post disaster disaster

The community design studio, in which I am participating, poses great challenges. We are looking to contribute progressive ideas to an area straddling St. Claude St., between St. Bernard Ave. and Press St., the neighborhoods of the Marigny and St. Roche. The emergingly relevant niche of post-disaster design will learn important and possibly painful lessons from the rebuilding New Orleans experiment.
How do you design for a community whose members are absent? How do you map a cultural landscape when the culture has changed due to a traumatic shock to its system? While much of the 'standard' literature for landscape architecture teaches the consideration of the physical, cultural, historical, ecological etc. landscapes, the new New Orleans changes the paradigm, changes the questions, and undoubtedly changes the answers.
In his article "Music-makers and the dreamers of dreams," John Hopkins refers to four disciplines, which contribute to landscape architecture: art, ecology, community, and political economy. These are the crucial elements to rebuilding New Orleans. The sense of community in rebuilding neighborhoods is abound, although vulnerable at times due to violence. The communal psyche is tired ... of seeing destruction's legacy daily. Art in New Orleans continues, and is the catalyst for the revival in many neighborhoods, including in the Marigny. The respect of ecology is something the design community to continue to push for in New Orleans. Without it, storms will continue to plague the 'city below sea level.' The most troublesome is the political economy of the area, political economy being the sum of many aspects of the government, public and political wills, resources (natural and otherwise), economy, etc. New Orleans and indeed Louisiana has an extensive, well documented history of corruptions and paying lip service to constituencies with no action benefiting the public. Inaction or incompetence will doom the process of rebuilding.
Well, with the situation in NO there is no easy answer to solving the systemic social, economic, political and infrastructural problems. Gaining an accurate perspective on NOs current situation may be impossible. Regardless of what happens in NO, lessons will be learned from the redesign process of post-disaster urban areas. Not to be a pessimist, but at some point in the future an urban area may be decimated by a terrorist attack, major earthquake, etc. Post Katrina maybe a practice run for how an American city rebuilds after large scale disaster. The answer to that question is as elusive as the ones surrounding the redesign of New Orleans.