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.