New Orleans' Holy Cross/Lower Ninth Ward (HC9) neighborhood became an unlikely and unplanned laboratory following its massive flooding and partial erasure after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This area of the city, magnified by the media, epitomized both the immense destruction of the storm and the racial inequalities embedded within urban structures. Over the last few years many “green” NGOs have focused their efforts on HC9 and it is now an evolving showplace for sustainable building practices. Given that these groups, their volunteers, material donations, and funding, form one of the main resource streams into the community, the “greening” has been welcomed by many. Indeed, according to its website, Holy Cross hopes to become the nation's first sustainable, carbon neutral neighborhood.

BARBARA L. ALLEN is the director of the graduate program in Science, Technology and Society (STS) at Virginia Tech's Washington DC area campus where she also teaches the sociology of risk, sociology of knowledge, and public participation in science and technology. She is the author of Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor Disputes (2003) and co-editor of several books including, Dynamics of Disaster, and Lessons on Risk, Response and Recovery (forthcoming, 2011). She is currently writing a book comparing citizen participation in policy-relevant science within environmental struggles in Europe and the U.S. Before receiving her Ph.D. in STS from RPI in 1999, Allen was a professor of architecture at Tulane University and at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. For more information, contact the Program in Science, Technology, and Public Policy through stpp.fordschool.umich.edu or email jbisanz@umich.edu