Decision-Making Among Businesses in Post-Catastrophe Uncertainty: How Economic Geographies Re-Form in New Orleans

该项目旨在了解灾后居民在城市环境中重新安置的商业方面。首要的研究问题是：企业如何在是否返回或搬迁的问题上做出空间决定，以及这些决定反过来如何影响景观和经济。具体地说，该项目将收集和分析有关卡特里娜飓风过后新奥尔良重新人口后，企业返回新奥尔良的内容、地点、方式、原因和时间的关键数据。对企业的电话调查和街头调查都将定期进行。街道调查将包括每两周对新奥尔良三个主要商业走廊的完整调查，跟踪哪里、何时以及哪些企业回归并生存(或倒闭)。这项电话调查每2~3周进行一次，共5轮，目标是全市的企业。在每一轮调查中，将随机抽样调查500个完整的调查，按普查地区和几个业务类别分层。然后，这两组调查数据将被绘制成地图，并与人口普查、洪水破坏和其他地理信息系统(地理信息系统)数据层集成。这将提供一个有价值的、对时间至关重要的时空数据集，可以用来回答一些特定的研究问题。很少有研究专注于收集对时间至关重要的经验性数据，关于企业在灾难发生后如何做出空间决策，决定他们是留下来还是搬迁，特别是像我们在卡特里娜飓风中看到的那样影响整个新奥尔良大都市的深度和广度的灾难。为该项目收集的时间关键型数据将提供有关在这一史无前例的情况下企业之间如何做出决策的独特信息。随着时间的推移，街道调查和电话调查的耦合和跟踪将为研究人类--社会--经济在空间和时间上的动态提供重要信息。这些数据将作为后续研究和与其他研究(例如关于个人所作决定的研究)进行比较的重要基准数据集。该项目的成果还将有助于政府和规划机构为该区域的经济复苏制定有效的政策。

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.