A planner's historic opportunity, impossible task John Beckman and his Phila. firm were asked to reimagine New Orleans. But they ran into a force as great as nature: Politics.

John Beckman, a Philadelphia city planner with mad-scientist hair, loped onto the ballroom stage at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel on Jan. 11 armed with a PowerPoint presentation and a grand urban vision. His firm, Wallace Roberts & Todd, had just completed a marathon effort to write an instruction manual for rebuilding flood-ravaged New Orleans.

Scanning the standing-room-only crowd of more than a thousand, it seemed to Beckman that every person in the room vibrated with grievance over what had happened to their elegant city and gracious way of life. He knew from 30 years as an urban planner that the audience wouldn't automatically embrace his ideas. But he never before had had to tell listeners that they might not be able to go home again.

"As a planner, you're always dealing with controversy," Beckman said afterward in WRT's sleek Market Street offices. "But none of us was quite prepared for the level of venom."

It was all he could do not to break down in tears, he said.

WRT, an international firm that has planned such projects as Baltimore's Inner Harbor and New Orleans' warehouse arts district, now finds itself enmeshed in its most politically charged, high-profile project since its founding 43 years ago. The firm, commissioned by Mayor C. Ray Nagin to craft a "vision plan" for New Orleans, had an assignment that was virtually unique in the history of city planning: Reimagine an existing city.

It also was a virtually impossible one: Beckman and his team of 12 planners were given 10 weeks to reinvent New Orleans. Even a by-the-numbers master plan can take two years.

Beckman's presentation at the Sheraton was the first salvo in a planning battle that will influence how much federal aid the city receives, who gets their hands on it, how quickly the city recovers - and whether New Orleans will still be a major American city a decade from now. Robert Yaro, a New York planner who played a key role in rethinking ground zero after 9/11, believes that "if the WRT plan isn't implemented, New Orleans could end up like Detroit," with lone houses isolated across large expanses of vacant land.

Despite the stakes, the skirmishing began even before Beckman dimmed the lights for his presentation.