The immediate aftermath of Katrina focused the world's attention on the vulnerability of the urban poor and racial/ethnic minority groups in New Orleans. This vulnerability can be viewed in terms of site, the proximity of a neighborhood to a hazard, and situation, the social context of that neighborhood. Vulnerabilities, associated with demographic characteristics such as being poor, being a member of a racial/ethnic minority group, and being female, will strengthen the force of a disaster. This paper uses a site and situation approach to show how maps of the five main sources of disaster-related stress in New Orleans can be used to predict where counseling resources should be targeted.

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This paper considers the interrelationship between residential occupancy status, blight, and crime. An analytical frame is provided for a fine-scale analysis that is sufficiently flexible to capture both spatial and temporal dynamism in field-collected data. Unlike other works linking crime to evidence of disorder within neighborhoods, this paper considers this relationship in terms of neighborhoods affected by an external event (natural disaster), which results in more dynamic spatial and temporal patterns as the neighborhood is in a state of flux. As a result, new means of data collection and analysis are required, as any fine-scale relationship is longitudinal as well as cross sectional. The focus here is on the interrelationship of post-disaster residential occupancy, building conditions, and crime incidence for the Holy Cross neighborhood of New Orleans as it recovers from Hurricane Katrina. Results suggest that crime is inversely related to the amount of activity on a recovering street. [

Background: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can provide valuable insight into patterns of human activity. Online spatial display applications, such as Google Earth, can democratise this information by disseminating it to the general public. Although this is a generally positive advance for society, there is a legitimate concern involving the disclosure of confidential information through spatial display. Although guidelines exist for aggregated data, little has been written concerning the display of point level information. The concern is that a map containing points representing cases of cancer or an infectious disease, could be re-engineered back to identify an actual residence. This risk is investigated using point mortality locations from Hurricane Katrina reengineered from a map published in the Baton Rouge Advocate newspaper, and a field team validating these residences using search and rescue building markings.