Debra Dupar, pregnant with her fifth child, is sitting outside her new house. She is washed by the noon sun of an early spring day, nursing a pinkish-red drink and chatting to her friends. A short way off a camera crew is setting up, assessing shots, squinting at the light, chatting to potential interviewees. They are working for Spike Lee, who is making a documentary about the place where Debra lives.
A guided tour of about a dozen people tramps along the vestigial street, marked out by some sinewy evergreen oaks, or "live oaks" as they are called here. Two men, self-consciously dressed – architects, probably – get out of a maroon taxi, scan the scene, sweep it with camcorders, say to each other: "OK, I'm good", get back in the taxi and go, all in about 60 seconds. And then the man from the London Observer wants to look inside Debra's house.
Brad Pitt had warned residents of New Orleans's Lower Ninth ward that "we would be turning their neighbourhood into a circus". He was referring to the Pink Project, an "art installation/political messaging device/fundraising tool" in 2007, when hundreds of pink fabric house-shapes were scattered about the site, ghosts of houses that had been and which would return. Now, with 23 houses newly built, it remains a circus, a vortex of disaster and celebrity from which media and sightseers can't stay away. For this spot is the location of Make It Right, the project launched by Pitt in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to which he has pledged $5m. Its aim is not only to rebuild at least 150 homes in the spot worst hit by the storm and its floods but to "turn tragedy into victory", as the actor put it, and to "offer a more humane building standard… We would create homes that were sustainable and build with clean building materials for a just quality of life… We would build for safety and storm resiliency. We'd create new jobs in the process and we wouldn't stop until we could achieve all of this affordably." To show he was serious he moved his family home to New Orleans, and joined in long and gritty community meetings about the best way forward.
"We'd call upon some of our great architectural minds to innovate these solutions," he said, and create "a template that could be replicated at the macro level. We would engage and rely on the community to define the function of their neighbourhood and adhere to their guidance, protecting New Orleans's rich culture." If the people of the Lower Ninth had been betrayed by professionals, by the engineers whose levees had failed in over 50 places, if "the most sickening thought is that this all could have been avoided", Pitt's mission was to "take what was wrong and make it right".
These were stirring words, born of a celebrity's stricken social conscience but also of the love of architecture Pitt had displayed before Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. He befriended the likes of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid. He had spent time in their studios, especially Gehry's, trying his hand at designing buildings himself.
It was a heroic project, and one that raised questions. How much would it really be about helping victims of Katrina, and how much would it be about making Pitt feel and look good? What would the star of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button truly know about urban regeneration?
What would "our great architectural minds", whose work is usually to design luxury items such as iconic museums and private villas, know about the hard practicalities of sustainable
low-income housing? Narcissism and charity are often close companions, perhaps inevitably, but would Make It Right be more a case of the former or the latter? And, in the aftermath of the Haiti and Chile earthquakes, are there any lessons from New Orleans for rebuilding there?
On 29 August 2005, the spot where Debra is now sitting was one of the worst places to be on earth. The horizon behind her is formed by the pale band of the infamous levee, essentially a long concrete wall, now rebuilt twice as thick and twice as high as its predecessor, and with basic precautions against undermining that weren't there before. The original levee was built by the US Army Corps of Engineers following Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and was supposed to keep out the waters of the adjoining Industrial Canal, which links the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain. When Katrina forced volumes of water up the canal, the levee suffered multiple breaches.
The streets nearest the levee were the worst hit. I meet Gloria, a woman in late middle age who had to get from the roof of her house on to another, and then into an oak, where she waited for nine and a half hours until her rescue. "Without that tree I'd have been dead," she says.
A few doors further along stands the rebuilt house of Robert Green. Its flagpole rises out of a granite tablet, beside it some damaged statuettes of saints, commemorating Joyce Green, 1931 to 2005, and Shanat Green, 2002 to 2005. The latter was lifted on to the roof by her grandfather, who then turned to help his other grandchild up. When he turned back to Shanat, she had vanished. Outside a nearby trailer, a tableau of wreathes and writing proclaims rage and hope: "We want our country to love us as much as we love our country. The strength of our country belongs to us all. Mr Bush, rebuild – New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward, Cross the Canal, Tennessee Street. NOT IRAQ." Then a later text: "Obama: A New Era of Responsibility".
The floods spread throughout the Lower Ninth, an almost all-black district with a population of 14,000. Over 1,000 of the more than 1,800 deaths caused by Katrina were in this district, and since then spiking rates of suicide and heart failure indicate further victims. This area is still the most visibly devastated. The picturesque parts of New Orleans, such as the French Quarter and the Garden District, were built on higher ground and were least affected, and now bear little or no trace of damage. The prettily porched and painted houses of Bywater, a former working-class area on the other side of the canal from the Lower Ninth, are now colonised by artists and designers. Young creative types have been moving into New Orleans since the flood, drawn by low property prices, sympathy, and the poignant glamour of disaster.
Much of the Lower Ninth, by contrast, is wilderness. Big vacant oblongs that were once city blocks sprout weeds between the concrete slabs which are all that are left of the wooden houses that stood here. Some poignant short flights of brick steps remain. Files of telegraph poles still stand, marking out the blocks but serving nothing. Occasionally a bright new house stands out.
Some houses still exist as ruins, boarded up or with doors swinging open. Some carry spray-painted X's, put there by rescuers in the days following Katrina. In the quadrants of each X are indicated, according to a code in use at the time, the number of people found in each house, alive and dead, and the number of pets, alive and dead. Other homes are being laboriously restored by their inhabitants. They have been partly helped by the Road Home programme, a federal compensation plan, which has often proved inadequate and slow moving. Two men, one lean and grey-whiskery, the other in a many-holed black T-shirt, tell me their repair work proceeds "paycheck by paycheck". Straight after the flood, many wondered aloud if it wouldn't be better just to give up on New Orleans. Its population was already in decline, from 625,000 in 1960 to 450,000 in 2005. All but a few thousand were temporarily evacuated across the United States, to safer places. The luckier ones would get insurance cheques. Why would they want to come back? "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," said Dennis Hastert (Republican, Illinois), the then Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Yet New Orleans didn't die, proof, perhaps, that cities are more than functional conveniences. They inspire affection, emotional ties and loyalty. It is now the fastest growing city in the United States, at 7-8% per year, even if, at about 340,000, it is still below pre-Katrina levels. If people persist in living in earthquake-prone Los Angeles and San Francisco, why would they not return to New Orleans?
This renewal is despite, more than thanks to, the efforts of the city's government. New Orleans has suffered from what the New York Times called the "dysfunctional stalemate that has bogged down the city's recovery". The dysfunction is both between black and white populations and between city and federal government, and the consequence is that swathes of the place are still visibly ruined, and homeless rates remain high. Recently a tide of frustration swept a new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, to power with 66% of the vote, but he has yet to take office.
In the nearly five years since the storm, a "recovery plan" was drawn up, often reviewed, and barely implemented. The city, according to one involved in reconstruction, "has hundreds of millions of dollars committed but not spent". The recovery plan was created "without a drop of sense as to what was implementable".
One of the most visible government interventions into housing has been to demolish hundreds of decent, solid, brick homes, built for the poor under the New Deal. The stated aim was to create a more "mixed income" neighbourhood – that is, a higher income neighbourhood – but destroying serviceable houses is not what New Orleans needs.
Into the vacuum of action created by government, individuals and independent agencies have piled in. Self-organised groups that have grown up since 2005 have become significant forces of renewal. For example, one band of survivors in the Lower Ninth got together, commandeered their local Martin Luther King school, and got it reopened. The authorities had been planning on keeping it closed.
Habitat for Humanity, an international charity, has built more than 1,300 "simple, decent, and affordable homes" in the four states affected by Hurricane Katrina and her nasty little sister Rita, which followed shortly after. Another not-for-profit organisation, Global Green, is building a development of exemplary levels of sustainability in Holy Cross, the area of the Lower Ninth that was least badly affected (which was still quite bad enough) by the flooding. Global Green is also advising individual home owners on sustainable ways to rebuild their homes, and is campaigning for high environmental standards in new schools. Bob Tannen, a New Orleans-based urban planner, engineer and artist, has worked with Frank Gehry to devise the "Modgun" house, an updated version of the area's traditional "shotgun house", with a long, narrow timber-framed structure which could be extended as their owners acquired the means to do so.
The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, an independently-governed public agency, says it is achieving "500-1,000" residential sales a year, and 300,000 sq ft of commercial spaces. Its director of real estate strategy Ommeed Sathe, a young, fluent and persuasive lawyer from New York, says: "We're working to the city's plan but we're better than them at implementing it." He blames slow progress on the bureaucratic procedures that government, but not his agency, have to follow: "If they want to spend a dollar they have to obey about 30 regulations… It's about as hard to buy a stapler as it is to buy a school."
NOTE: This article was edited on 15 March 2010 to remove an editor's note that was erroneously included.
Brad Pitt's project is therefore neither the biggest, nor the speediest, nor the most prolific (in terms of units built) of the reconstruction efforts. There's a certain rivalry between the different people pushing New Orleans's physical recovery, and those outside Make It Right tend to speak with a combination of gratitude for the attention that the film star has brought to their issues and envy for the attention that he draws to his own project. He was first introduced to the field through a connection with Global Green and, although the latter organisation is too polite to say so, you sense that they would rather he had lent his pulling power to their projects than branching off on his own.
Make It Right's USP is design. Its houses would not only be built (as Global Green's are) to exemplary standards of sustainability and flood protection. They would not only use construction techniques that would use 30% less timber than conventional methods. They would also have whatever added magic outstanding architects could bring. A team of 21 architects was assembled, with GRAFT, a practice based in both Los Angeles and Berlin, being one of the first to get involved, and a local firm, Williams Architects, as executive architects. The architects included the Pritzker prize-winning Morphosis from Los Angeles, the provocative Dutch firm MVRDV, and Shigeru Ban, a Japanese architect whose reputation is based on the usual array of intriguing cultural projects and private houses but also on his emergency cardboard constructions, designed in response to the 1995 Kobe earthquake.
There were the celebrated British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye, Elemental from Chile, Constructs LLC from Ghana, and the Philadelphia firm of Kieran Timberlake, who have just been announced as the architects of the new US Embassy in London. There were also less famous practices from nearer to the Lower Ninth: five from New Orleans and others from Texas and Missouri. All work without payment: "Their work and designs are a donation to the residents of the Lower Ninth ward and society as a whole," as GRAFT puts it.
Designs were based on guidelines derived from traditional New Orleans types. Porches to shelter from sun and rain, almost ubiquitous in this city, should be included. The architects produced 28 prototype designs in two "presentations". Residents could choose which type they wanted, and could customise them. They could, for example, decide how high off the ground they wanted to be. Most went for as high as possible, not only to stand above future floods but also to allow room to park cars underneath.
These houses were for people who had owned homes before the storm and now had little property left but rectangles of mud. (Although poor, the Lower Ninth had been one of the first places where African-Americans could buy homes, and had high rates of home ownership.) The deal was that families had to "expose their finances" and "put forward what they could afford". The gap between that and the actual cost of construction would be covered by a "forgivable loan", to be repaid only if they sold their houses on.
The result is an array of similar-but-different houses, with bright colours and unusual angles denoting different authorships. Debra Dupar's house is, she tells me, called the "Space House", on account of the futuristic swoop of its louvred sunshade, and she is quite happy with that. Inside, her house is more simple, with a decent, well-proportioned front room dominated by a big flat-screen TV, a fish tank, and a table ornament that spells HAPPINESS in thick bronze-coloured letters. Not that design is the main issue for her: she spent four years in a trailer-home in Simmesport, Louisiana, 150 miles away, and, even though she is paying for her home, she is happy to be back. The residents did not, as might have been expected, opt for the most conservative or traditional-looking designs, but it's fair to say that the most convincing homes tend to be by the less starry architects. The only type no one wanted was MVRDV's, in which a traditional house-shape appears to have been snapped into a giant V by an invisible karate chop or natural disaster. The V contains a clever internal arrangement of split levels, but it still looked too much like a bad joke to victims of Katrina.
Morphosis put much of their own time and money into a house which, using Dutch techniques, would float in the event of flood, with two metal poles preventing it from drifting away. There's nothing wrong with that, except that the architect's styling is so overwrought, with so many odd angles and assertive details, that it would be an oppressive place to inhabit.
One of the more convincing structures is the Mobile Goat Unit of Operation Slo-Mow, designed by students at New Orleans's Tulane university. This is a wheeled trailer containing goats, who are released to keep surrounding grass under control. Apparently this method is more cost-effective and environmental than hiring men with mowing machines.
It's not always obvious what the architects' gestures add to the project, as distinct from the more practical stuff about sustainability (which lowers residents' utilities bills), flood protection, and more efficient ways of building. According to Ommeed Sathe: "People look at Make It Right and see it as whimsical and nonsensical… There's also a criticism that for that amount of money you could have made 500 homes." But: "I think it has added value. You get 10 to 12 tour buses a day in an area where there was very little redevelopment energy.'' It has "also served as a massive R&D project", pioneering techniques and developing skills in contractors that can now be applied elsewhere.
Louis Jackson, a forthright contractor working on Make It Right, says something similar. "The challenging part," he says, is getting architects "to realise they're not designing a $5m mansion. Some of the guys have been closed-minded. They'd say, 'I'm the designer, I am the king and you do it my way.' But if you think about the big picture of it – and I have to do that sometimes to keep my sanity – it's a learning process, and we are much better today than we were a year ago."
Jackson hasn't made money on the project but he is far from regretting his involvement. "It's fun, it's challenging, it's something you think about all the time." It is also a "reputation-builder", and something that teaches him things he can use on other projects. "The third time we build something we should be getting pretty close to how it should be," he says.
The question also remains why they rebuilt on this exact spot. If you look at a map of New Orleans with a cold eye, it seems logical to return the Lower Ninth ward, which is below sea level, to uninhabited wetlands, and to rehouse its former citizens in the many gaps in higher, relatively safe parts of the city. No one is very confident that the place won't get flooded again, despite the improved levees. "If anything serious comes through, like another category 5 hurricane, we're going to get washed away again," says one resident. Bob Tannen, who worked for the city on building their roads, says: "The levee is now designed for another Katrina, but what happens if it is worse than Katrina?"
But cold logic overlooks the detail that, for low-income homeowners, their plots in the flood zone were the only property they had left, as well as the fact that the political will and mechanisms to attempt wholesale relocation were wholly lacking. It ignores the fact that the Lower Ninth was not just a statistical unit but a place of memories and associations for New Orleans's black communities. The pianist Fats Domino refused to live anywhere else until Katrina forced him out of his mansion. The common sense of building only above sea level would also mean evacuating much of the Netherlands.
It's also fair to say that this site offered the most scope for Brad Pitt to strut his charitable stuff. The worst part of the worst affected district gave the best stage for a dramatic transformation, and actors are in the habit of looking for the best stage. Make It Right is not without ego, on the part of either Pitt or his architects. If one thing is to be learned from the project, whether in Chile, Haiti, or in building further houses in New Orleans, it would be to recruit a smaller crew of architects, and get them to focus more tightly on what really does constitute the best possible home in places like this.
Only a miserable churl, however, could fail to be moved by the scene Make It Right now offers. It has turned devastation and misery into something hopeful, and there is an energy about the place that other post-Katrina reconstruction projects don't offer. The show-off architecture does its bit, too, in adding to the festivity of the place. Also as a sign that someone could be bothered.
It may be that Brad's model village has a touch of the Hollywood vanity project but I can think of very many much worse ways to use celebrity and influence.
NOTE: This article was edited on 15 March 2010 to remove an editor's instruction that was included erroneously.