Open for business again — thanks to mom-and-pop stores and voluntourists

New Orleans always had a split personality. There was the picture-postcard city that visitors enjoyed: lovely, languid, funky, obsessed with food and music and bon temps, in the local parlance. Then there was workaday New Orleans, home to poverty that would have shocked the rest of America and the developed world if they had seen it. On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed that other side for all to see. Residents who filled the Superdome, who lined the streets around the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center waiting for days for food, water, help, were in many cases the same people who filled the low-wage service jobs that made the tourist economy tick.

Local leaders were left with a conundrum. Without tourism, which pre-Katrina employed 75,000 people, there could be no recovery. Images of flooding and mayhem beamed around the world were bound to frighten potential visitors, yet efforts to portray the city as ready to welcome them back might send the wrong signal too — that the tourism establishment was insensitive, that New Orleans no longer needed outside help. What has emerged has been a delicate balancing act, a promise of good times along with an acknowledgment of the bad that is now part of the city’s story.

The New Orleans most people know didn’t flood, the message goes: the neighbourhoods along the Mississippi river — the sunken city’s highest ground, thanks to centuries of silt deposits, now nicknamed the Sliver by the River — include the French Quarter and the stately Garden District. The New Orleans which people discovered after Katrina is here too, still damaged, and the way to help it is to come and spend. Or pick up a shovel or a hammer. Since Katrina, the city has welcomed a parade of so-called voluntourists, who gut or build houses, replace trees killed by floodwater, then sleep on church floors — or retreat to fancy restaurants.