A Sun columnist travels through the looking glass to the grim streets of New Orleans’ still-reeling Lower Ninth Ward.

I landed in a city of palm trees, tired and disheveled, barely able to carry my bags, until I found a nice Egyptian cabdriver to come to my rescue. My Spring Break started pretty similarly to years past. But this time Akram was not picking me up from Ben Gurion Airport but from Louis Armstrong Airport. I had landed not in Jerusalem, but in New Orleans. Akram was the first of many surprises on my trip. We chatted the whole way down to the Lower Ninth Ward, where he wanted to know why a girl like me would go to a place like that. I thought he was being a little harsh — even if he did end every sentence with “princess” — until I looked up a few blocks before my destination and saw a sign that declared: “No loitering. No crack selling.”

Having joined my CRP class a few weeks into the semester and now a day late into our working trip, I was once again trying to get my bearings. It is a little harder in New Orleans, where opposites are absurdly juxtaposed. Much of New Orleans gives one a sense of being Alice in an urban Wonderland. Instead of changing between big and small, you jump from beautiful, serene and genteel to rough, wild and haunted.

As a class, CRP 395, “Sustainable New Orleans,” we are working with ACORN, a national non-profit that focuses on affordable housing and community development. ACORN has been Cornell’s partner in their many relief and rebuilding efforts since Katrina. As a group, we were a motley crew. With 13 students (a mix of grad and undergrad), our professor George Frantz, two embedded Cornell Chronicle staff, Robert and Dan, a Cornell Alumni Magazine reporter, Beth, and another CRP professor John Forester and his wife Anne Kilgor. We had a gamut of perspectives and objectives.

Every day we had a mix of meetings with community members, ACORN staff, city officials and survivors as well as working at a target site. Our target site is an area of about 60 blocks in the Lower Ninth that is practically empty and devoid of any commercial development. In order to have a greater understanding for the context of our work we visited three other communities: Viet Village, a Vietnamese community that has done remarkable redevelopment since Katrina; Holy Cross, the Lower Ninth’s neighboring community that has exhibited immense community organizing ability and is working very well with the Office for Recovery Management (the city department in charge of rebuilding); and Biloxi, Miss. In Biloxi we met with Diana, a local woman who organized her church’s relief work in East Biloxi and who added layers of new perspective on the situation. She reminded us that New Orleans was not the only place to suffer from the storm and that survivors have and are still experiencing incredible trauma. As planners I don’t think most of us were focused on the mental stress involved.

Returning to the Lower Ninth armed with knowledge, ideas and humility we were invigorated to do something practical and implementable. Before Katrina, the Lower Ninth was low-income but very vibrant and dense. As part of our work we are trying to design and implement plans for fostering economic growth in the community. While ACORN is focusing on rebuilding the limited housing stock, we are also looking for ways to supplement it so that the community members — who have few cars and little to no access to public transportation — can get back on their feet.

Discussing our ideas for economic development was one of the many frank, open and informal conversations we had as a class. Without a doubt each of our past experiences informed our thought process. While I wanted to know why homeownership programs in the Lower Ninth were such a priority in light of the current economic climate, Prof. Frantz taught all of us about applying lessons from rural planning in an urban setting. He took us to a nearby bayou to show us the environmental destruction and explain how a reversal of the bayou back to freshwater would help the environment, act as a natural buffer and provide fish for food and business to the Lower Ninth. He further demonstrated how low-resourced communities have been sustainable out of necessity and if only programs could be constructed to facilitate providing access to natural resources, the Lower Ninth could maintain their small footprint. Before this trip I was much more focused on marketing the sustainability movement as a trendy exercise and hoping it trickled down to mainstream America. However, working with communities that have always practiced sustainability for their own benefit and maximizing those efforts now seems more logical if not obvious.

One of the things I will take away most from the trip was the opportunity to pick the brains of some many people with the same interests as me (a.k.a. map nerds) but extremely diverse backgrounds. Whether it was about if public housing is good for a community, or if Borat or Bruno is more offensive, or the group’s trip to megillah reading the car rides gave us a chance to discuss the things that would have been hashed out if the North Campus Initiative had panned out as it should have. It is both disappointing and refreshing that these experiences occurred during my last semester on campus.

Cornell offers many classes that contain a service aspect. I am unfamiliar with most of them outside of AAP, but CRP offers courses with local and foreign service components. You can travel to Nicaragua, Brazil, Spain, New Orleans, Liberty, New York, or stay in Ithaca and help here. These courses are an opportunity to apply lessons firsthand and hopefully give back to the people being studied while also inspiring you to get excited about life after college whether that is grad school or working (something I was in desperate need of!).

My mosquito bites may have scabbed over and my sunburn is done peeling but much of what I saw in New Orleans is still as raw as a slap in the face. Exit light, Enter night, Take my hand, We’re off to never never land.

Simone Greenbaum is a senior in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. She can be contacted at sgreenbaum@cornellsun.com. Socialist Socialite appears alternate Wednesdays.