Edward J. Blakely, an urban planning expert who helped oversee disaster recovery in a number of cities, including Oakland, Calif., following the 1989 earthquake and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where he was roundly criticized for failing to deliver on his promises, died on Sept. 6 at his home in Sydney, Australia. He was 87.
His death was announced by the University of California, Berkeley, where Mr. Blakely taught from 1974 to 1994 and served as chairman of the department of city and regional planning.
When Mr. Blakely arrived in New Orleans in early 2007, the city was still reeling from the storm that had hit 16 months before. Its population had been nearly halved, whole neighborhoods were ruined, and the municipal government — under a mayor, C. Ray Nagin, who would later be found guilty of bribery and fraud — was paralyzed.
Mr. Blakely, who had previous experience in disaster recovery, was brought in from Australia, where he held a faculty position at the University of Sydney, to take matters in hand.
During his tenure at Berkeley, Mr. Blakely had been a key player in urban governance. “Through two mayoral administrations, he had an office in City Hall and was an adviser on everything from rebuilding freeways after the 1989 earthquake, to redeveloping shuttered naval bases and reforming demoralized schools,” The New York Times wrote in 2000. (He ran for mayor of Oakland in 1998, finishing a distant second to Jerry Brown, who went on to become the governor of California.)
Things were different in New Orleans. “The only thing I had from Mayor Nagin was his injunction: ‘Fix it!,’” Mr. Blakely wrote in his 2012 memoir, “My Storm: Managing the Recovery of New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina.”
“What the hell did THAT mean?” he added.
But the task of bringing the city back proved far larger than one man at the helm of a dysfunctional city government could handle.
Mr. Blakely proceeded to develop a plan of “target zones,” 17 areas in the devastated city that would be the focus of intensive development and investment, with the idea that they would drive the overall recovery.
In early interviews, he promised “cranes on the skyline” by September 2007 and — unused to the spotlight but accustomed to a tenured professor’s independence of tongue — let loose with a series of sharp-edged characterizations of local foibles, raising hackles in a place where many are acutely sensitive to outsiders’ perceptions.
New Orleans’s warring racial factions, he said, were “a bit like the Shiites and Sunnis.” He called the civic elite “insular” and described residents as “buffoons.”
By the time Mr. Blakely left 31 months later, few of his goals had been accomplished. There had been no “cranes on the skyline” in September, and he had succeeded in nothing so much as eliciting a collective “good riddance” from residents and the local press.
“A complete list of Nagin’s ill-considered and disastrous hires would fill a book,” a columnist for The Times-Picayune, James Gill, wrote years after Mr. Blakely had returned to Australia. “Pride of place would have to go to Ed Blakely, his choice to lead the city’s Katrina recovery, who spent half his time spouting gobbledygook and the other half bad-mouthing the local populace.”
An editorial in the same newspaper shortly after his departure put it succinctly: “It wouldn’t be correct to say that Mr. Blakely achieved nothing during his tenure in New Orleans. But the list is pretty slim given the authority bestowed upon him.”
While New Orleans did eventually recover from the terrible storm of August 2005, it had little to do with Mr. Blakely and his ambitious plan. And the recovery was far from complete: With a current population of about 360,000, the city is still at least 100,000 short of its pre-Katrina tally, and it continues to lose residents.
But some of the scorn aimed at Mr. Blakely was misdirected. The weaknesses that he identified — a fragile economy that relied too heavily on tourism, an insular civic culture — persist. Mr. Blakely was correct in identifying an influx of outsiders as a key factor in any potential renaissance for a city that had been in long, slow decline well before Katrina hit.
And he was accurate in perceiving, even before he had begun work in New Orleans, that its perennial drawbacks — poverty, corruption, incompetent local officials — had been exacerbated by Katrina, not created by it.
“I found these and other underlying problems to be far more compelling and challenging than the ravages of the storm itself,” he wrote in his memoir. “In other words, much of the disaster had happened before the disaster.”
Edward James Blakely was born on April 21, 1938, in San Bernardino, Calif., one of two sons of Edward Blakely, a railroad worker who later owned a gas station, and Josephine Elizabeth (Carter) Blakely.
He earned a B.A. in 1960 from the University of California, Riverside, where he played football. In 1963, he earned an M.A. in Latin American history from Berkeley. He earned a Ph.D. in education and management from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1970. Much later, in 2018, he earned a law degree from Northwestern University.
After his time at Berkeley, Mr. Blakely taught at the University of Southern California and at the New School in New York, where he served as dean of management and urban policy. He was a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Sydney and served as a justice of the peace in New South Wales and as acting commissioner for the New South Wales Land and Environment Court.
The statement from Berkeley announcing Mr. Blakely’s death noted that he “advised the governments of Japan, Turkey, Chile, Honduras and Indonesia after disasters there.” He was particularly proud of the work he did in Italy as a visiting professor in urban climate change at Università Iuav di Venezia, assisting the government of Venice in fighting the rising tides there, his daughter Pieta Blakely said in an interview.
Mr. Blakely was the author, with Mary Gail Snyder, of “Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States” (1997); with William W. Goldsmith, of “Separate Societies: Poverty and Inequality in U.S. Cities” (2010); and with Nancey Green Leigh, of “Planning Local Economic Development: Theory and Practice” (1988 and subsequent editions).
In addition to his daughter Pieta, he is survived by his wife, Maaike; another daughter, Brette Blakely; two granddaughters; and a brother, Warren.
Throughout his tempestuous tenure in New Orleans, Mr. Blakely remained haunted by his initial impression of the city in 2007 in Katrina’s aftermath.
“The ride downtown from the airport that January day was like passing through one long, uninterrupted place of mourning,” he wrote in his memoir. “Sand seemed to cover every surface. The skies, along with everything else, were dull gray. I saw no birds flying or roosting.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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