Almost five years ago... yet still so close and affecting the city everyday...\r\n\r\nAugust 29th, 2005: the day that changed the urban landscape of the city of New Orleans. When Hurricane Katrina struck, the Crescent City was already amongst the poorest cities in the United States with 27.9% of individuals below the poverty line versus 12.4% for the United States in 2000, according to the Census Bureau. Today, it also counts the highest amount of vacant housing with over 29% of residences being constantly empty, and representing more than twice the national average. If New Orleans is clearly rebuilding from the storm, it is still facing many urban problems linked with poor struggling cities. Additionally, it appears as though if the city\'s population is slowly growing back to its normal self, it seems difficult to establish whether the incoming population is made of former residents being finally able to come back, or new comers attracted by employment opportunities in a city that saw so many of its qualified workers leave. This also raises the issue of how to determine whether the city as a whole is doing better or if figures clearly are misleading the general opinion into thinking that New Orleans is becoming wealthier. As a matter of fact, many lower income jobs have disappeared and thus this has the impact of artificially raising the median income. One may think that therefore it proves that the city as a whole is recovering, but should this not prove that the original population, the one that was in majority poor, before the storm, has not been able to come back and is slowly being replaced by wealthier groups that now constitute a vast proportion of the \"new\" New Orleanians? Providing that this assumption is correct, what does it mean for the city? Should we then consider that the population, the attributes, the culture that made New Orleans such a unique place is slowly disappearing? Should we also then wonder, if the city\'s culture is evolving with a majority of new comers, and therefore, if this will lead to seeing its dynamics and population change, but also if it could mean that no sufficient measures are taken for former residents to come back. \r\nAccording to many comments I hear in the streets of the city, the old New Olreans no longer is, and therefore it seems legitimate to wonder about the reconstruction of a city that has lost such a large part of its original population, and thus of its authenticity.