This project seeks to understand the commercial side of resettlement of residents in urban environments after a catastrophe. The overarching research question is: how businesses make spatial decisions on whether to return or relocate and how these decisions in turn impact the landscape and its economy. Specifically, the project will collect and analyze time-critical data on what, where, how, why, and when businesses return to New Orleans following the repopulation of the city after Hurricane Katrina. Both telephone surveys and street surveys of businesses will be conducted periodically. The street surveys will include a complete survey of three major commercial corridors in New Orleans every two weeks, tracking where, when, and what businesses return and survive (or fail). The telephone surveys, conducted every 2~3 weeks for 5 rounds, will target businesses throughout the entire city. In each round, a random sample of 500 complete surveys stratified by census tract and by a few business categories will be conducted. Both sets of survey data will then be mapped and integrated with census, flood damage, and other GIS (geographic information system) data layers. This will provide a valuable, time-critical spatial-temporal data set that can serve to answer a number of specific research questions.
Very little research has focused on collecting time-critical, empirical data on how businesses make spatial decisions on whether they remain or relocate after a catastrophe, especially a catastrophe as deep and wide as we have seen in Hurricane Katrina that affects an entire metropolis of New Orleans. The time-critical data collected for this project will provide unique information on how decisions among businesses are made in this unprecedented case. The coupling and tracking of street and telephone surveys over time will provide vital information for research on human-social-economic dynamics over space and time. The data will serve as an important benchmark dataset for subsequent research and for comparisons with other studies (e.g. studies on decisions made by individuals). Results from this project will also help governmental and planning agencies in devising effective policies for economic recovery in the region.
