Ideal City | New Orleans City at Sea Date | June 8, 2009 Source | Mega-Engineering: City at Sea, Discovery Channel

Architects | Engineers in Collaboration with Patri Friedman + Eugene Tsui Type | Future Proposal for a Self-Contained City on Water

RE-THINKING NEW ORLEANS AS A FLOATING CITY POST-KATRINA | Recreating NAwlins on a Tabular Rasa vs. Community Redevelopment

Lisa Hinderdael UD 3 | Tutors_Nicholas Boyarksy + Camila Sotomayor UCL The Bartlett School of Architecture MArch Urban Design 11-12 BENVUD 1 | History + Theory

Lisa Hinderdael MArch Urban Design 11-12 Synopsis On August 30, 2005, New Orleanians who had waited out the storm woke up to what seemed to be the next Atlantis. New Orleans was engulfed in floodwaters and the future of the city was unclear. In the aftermath, unsure of how to react to such a significant catastrophe, planners and designers began to rethink how to design the city before it became lost forever. On one side of the spectrum planners and architects proposed ideal city schemes and sprawling urban renewal schemes that re-defined New Orleans at the macro-scale. On the other side of the spectrum, residents of NAwlins and design-build programs proposed micro-scale schemes that looked at the urban fabric and cultural history of New Orleans and the importance of the neighbourhood scale. Drawing upon precedents of floating cities from the past, and design-build and communitybased programs such as Make it Right in the Lower Ninth Ward and URBANbuild at Tulane University, this paper aims to analyze which is a better solution: a macro-scale start from scratch for New Orleans or a micro-scale redevelopment of neighbourhoods.

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Table of Contents Introduction 4 The Floating City Ideal | Historical Precedents 5 City at Sea Solution | Overall Design Structure of Temporary, Modular Design...............7 What are the Techniques for Survival? | Infrastructure + Economy.......................9 Is the Crescent City Culture Going to Be Lost at Sea? ....11 Alternative Solutions at Play | Rural Studios vs. Celebrity Homes .13 Conclusion | We Cannot Recreate NAwlins ...........................15 Reference and Illustration Lists . ..............................16

Lisa Hinderdael MArch Urban Design 11-12 Introduction On August 29, 2005, New Orleans was struck by the worst natural disaster in American history: Hurricane Katrina. The world watched as houses were uprooted from the ground, levees breached, storm surges reached upwards of 28 feet, and 80 percent of the city became engulfed in floodwaters.1 For years, reports showed that the Army Corps of Engineers had not built the levees correctly, but nobody took action. In days following the storm, the Associated Press compared the rebuilding costs of New Orleans to 4 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.2 Devastation had struck upon the Crescent City. Katrina also brought what some have considered a hidden miracle for New Orleans: a chance to start from scratch. As architect William Ramroth describes: nothing captures our collective attention more than disaster; it shakes us awake, forces us to rethink how we plan and build, and propels us into action.3 In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this became very evident. Proposals for how to rebuild the city came in the thousands. Urban planners suggested new sprawling plans to rebuild the infrastructure of the city, the Army Corps of Engineers proposed new adjustments to the levee and water-pumping stations, and others proposed total abandonment of the city. But were these proposals, of which most were politically driven and turned a blind eye to the pre-Katrina New Orleans charm, really the solution? Could an Ideal City proposal for moving New Orleans to a City at Sea move from a utopian vision to a revolutionary reality? The vision of a floating city can be traced back to the Metabolist Movement and Kenzo Tanges Tokyo Bay Design in the 1960s, but the recent surge in natural disasters worldwide has re-sparked interest in the topic. In 1984, Kevin Lynch dreamt of floating cities that might ride with the ocean currents, extracting energy from the sun, and food and raw materials from the sea.4 Similarly, German Architect Wolf Hilbertz imagined a floating city off the coast of Portugal. It is from these precedents that a group of engineers have proposed a revolutionary design to abandon modern-day New Orleans and relocate to a City at Sea able to disperse during times of disaster. The question this paper aims to look at is whether or not this utopian vision of a City at Sea is the right solution. Simply relocating the community of New Orleans ignores the importance of its unique history, and could be a disastrous failure. New Orleans has a rich culture of jazz, a unique architectural typology, and a social class divide that is engrained in its culture; all of which would be left as ruins if the city was moved to sea. Even though the future of the city remains unclear, and it will probably never be what it was before the storm; it seems than an important aspect of reconstruction is the psychological need for residents to restore what once existed.5 Tulane Universitys URBANbuild studio and Brad Pitts Make it Right homes in the Lower Ninth Ward are attempting to create this restoration by focusing on neighbourhood designs, and community participation and development. Perhaps, then, the solution is not in the idealist visions of macro-scale projects that lose grip with reality but in looking at the micro-scale and the precedents of community-based design in Rural Studios for what can be done to restore NAwlins.

William G. Ramroth, Planning for Disaster: How Natural and Man-made Disasters Shape the Built Environment, (New York: Kaplan, 2007), 202. 2 Ramroth, Planning for Disaster, 3. 3 Ramroth, Planning for Disaster, ix. 4 Kevin Lynch, Good City Form, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1984), 387. 5 Ramroth, Planning for Disaster, 108.

Lisa Hinderdael MArch Urban Design 11-12 The Floating City Ideal | Historical Precedents Planners and architects over the past few decades have imagined visions of floating cities; but until present-day most of the utopian visions remain a dream. Today, the designs are being reconsidered as the threat of global warming enters the forefront of debates in the field of architecture. With ocean currents getting stronger and the threat of sea levels rising, coastal cities are in more danger than ever. New Orleans, which lies on the southeastern tip of Louisiana, is one of these cities. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as designers consider what can be done to avoid what they have called a second Katrina, it has become necessary to re-evaluate these old ideal designs and see if they can be put into practice in a new form. The first floating city ideas existed in the 1960s during the Metabolist Movement. The Metabolists were a group of young architects who believed that a revolution in architecture and city design would lead to a new order for modern society and that their projects were universal 6 models for the future. Often thinking about how inhabitants could live on water or the sky, Metabolists fought for letting the existing city remain as is and designing new ones on a tabula 7 rasa. The most prominent example of this period was Kenzo Tanges Tokyo Bay Project from 1961. Linear in design, the proposal extended from the existing city of Tokyo to the new city on 8 the bay. Tange imagined that the city on the bay would be a response to the filth of Tokyo and its severe land shortages as it continued to expand. The city itself was designed under spatial 9 planning that left open urban spaces beneath layers of infrastructure. Similar to Tange, the engineers exploring the notions of a City at Sea appear to be the next Metabolists, but there is one key difference: whereas the City at Sea calls for complete abandonment of the existing city of New Orleans, Metabolists only created new cities but let the old ones remain.

Figure 1. Tokyo Bay Design by Kenzo Tange.

As technology developed and designers became more experimental in their designs, the visions of a floating city became more complex in their technological rigor. German-born architect Wolf Hilbertz spent the majority of his last years working towards his vision of a city called Autopia Ampere. Based on prototypes of Hilbertz earlier work with combinations of sunlight and limestone to create structural stability, Autopia Ampere would be a self-sufficient island off the coast of Portugal. Wolf Hilbertz had found a way to use sunlight to turn the minerals in seawater 10 into limestone. For the first time, the vision of a floating city seemed in reach as the idea works 11 in practice as well as theory.
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Zhongjie Lin, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan, (New York: Routledge, 2010), 110. 7 Lin, Kenzo Tange, 71. 8 Lin, Kenzo Tange, 165. 9 Lin, Kenzo Tange, 148. 10 Andy Turnbull, Ocean-Grown Homes, Popular Mechanics (1997): 56. 11 Turnbull, Ocean-Grown Homes, 56.

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Figure 2. Autopia Ampere Design by Wolf Hilbertz

But are we even ready for this type of design? In 2007, two Dutch Architects proposed a temporal Floating City for the Shanghai World Expo of 2010 and were denied the prize. The structures were honeycomb in form and each housed separate programmatic functions. Technologically, the structures would have each gotten cooling from the water below and be self12 sustainable. If selected, the opportunity could have been eye-opening to new debates in architecture and global warming, but instead it was left to the presentation boards.

Figure 3. Shanghai World Expo Design by Dutch firm

What these precedents show is visions by architects of a city on water. But right now these are just peas in the pod of many urban visions that try to relate futuristic designs to contemporary issues or concerns of architects. Each going further to make the dream vision a reality, we must begin to consider if the City at Sea design of the Engineers for Post-Katrina New Orleans is just another one of these peas in the pod, or could it be the next best thing? Could they be the next Metabolists designing on a tabula rasa for the future?

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Naresh Kumarchauhan, 15 Floating Structures Staring in the Face of the Future, DesignBuzz blog, April 9, 2009, http://www.designbuzz.com/entry/15-floating-structures-staring-in-the-face-of-the-future.html.

Lisa Hinderdael MArch Urban Design 11-12 City at Sea Solution | Overall Design Structure of Temporary, Modular Design The overall design structure for the City at Sea is a modular design that can house the 300,000 people currently in New Orleans and has both permanent and temporal locations. The vision is for a floating city that will be ever-expanding as separate hexagonal shaped platforms interlock into a mega-structure.13 The interlocking form of the city platforms allows the city to split off into anywhere in the surrounding ocean and create smaller seed colony copies of itself.14 In essence, the floating city has no true boundary or size, able to expand all the way across the earths water surface. The flexible form of the City at Sea is key in the overall design. Research shows that if it wasnt for the storm surge, the levees would not have breached, and New Orleans would have only suffered the turmoil of wind and rain typical of any normal hurricane. 15 Instead, the ability of each platform to detach and re-attach easily to the overall form of the modular structure allows for the city to scatter before a storm and regroup miles away in calm waters.16 When it becomes necessary and meteorologists forecast a hurricane approaching, the city can disperse to temporal locations within the Gulf or even far out at sea. Furthermore, the form of the city is standardized as every piece of the city is prefabricated off-site and then brought to sea to inter-lock with the existing structural form. This allows for careful calibration of buildings and weight stability to allow the structures to float.17 The standardized structure, however, means that the city will look very block-like with traditional city-blocks being replaced with hexagonal-blocks. To not lose the entire essence of New Orleans original form, the idea is that the floating city separates the downtown French Quarter with a fulltram system from the residential housing platforms that surround it. Analysis of this Form The modular design of the City at Sea seems ideal when all that is being considered is the need to avoid the storm surge, and survive the strong waves of the Gulf. However, the modular design poses many concerns for New Orleanians. A proposal of reconstruction such as the City at Sea completely assumes that New Orleans can just be removed from its historical context and its entire city rebuilt anew. For planners, this is often the tactic used. As urban planner and founder of Planetizen, an urban design website, Abhijeet Chavan says: Planners involved in the task of reconstruction planning face a critical decision: rebuild a city or neighbourhood as it was before, or use the destruction as an opportunity to replan an area according to new ideas about how to build cities.18 In the case of New Orleans, the engineers are focusing on the next big thing: water.19 The flexible New Orleans ignores many of the issues that would come up if the city were to disperse. For a city to be able to survive this type of dispersal, each separate platform would have to be self-sustaining for extended periods of time. Hurricane Katrina was first spotted as a tropical storm on August 23, 2005; only one week prior to making landfall on New Orleans.20 This short period of time is surely not enough for a city to disperse. Furthermore, the current ideal floating city suggests that residents will first move back to their residential living spaces, and it is these floating pieces that will disperse as smaller communities. From there, the downtown area will remain interconnected and move off on its own completely disconnected from the
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City at Sea, Mega-Engineering, Discovery Channel, (June 8, 2009). Patrick Salsbury, Distributed Floating Cities: A Laboratory for Exploring Social Utopias, in Viable Utopian Ideas: Shaping a Better World, ed. Arthur B, Shostak (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 99. 15 City at Sea, Mega-Engineering. 16 City at Sea, Mega-Engineering. 17 City at Sea, Mega-Engineering. 18 Abhijeet Chavan, introduction to Planetizen Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning (Washington, DC: Island, 2007), 108. 19 Koen Olthuis and David Keuning, Float! : Building on Water to Combat Urban Congestion and Climate Change, (Amsterdam: Frame, 2010), 51. 20 Hurricane Katrina, accessed November 22, 2011, http://ncdc.noaa.gov/special-reports/katrina.html.

Lisa Hinderdael MArch Urban Design 11-12 residential parts of town. This would require a large establishment of a sense of community if people are to live without the downtown resources for days on end, and pre-planning of access to food and water. The social fabric of the city would be tampered with, as people will be split off from other residents they know for significant periods of time during hurricane season. In essence, the very nature of the city would be different. The second issue is the assumption that New Orleanians feel at home in this design. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, NAwlins seemed to have been lost forever, but resilient residents fought back from the storm and slowly started to pick up the pieces and rebuild. When 21 Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, 78% of its residents were native-born. The power of the people to unite means that they feel a strong connection to place, so asking them to relocate to an entirely new city will prove to be a challenge. If residents chose not to relocate, the charm of the New Orleans people will cease to exist and it will just be a City at Sea, not New Orleans. The imagination of a new city sounds great in theory, but this type of structure reimagines the nature of a city for better or for worse. New Orleanians proved once in the aftermath of Katrina that even if engulfed in floodwaters, they would be resilient, because this a city they call home. Perhaps the ideal of a floating city requires the creation of a completely new city, but not the relocation of an existing one.

21

Stephen Verderber, The Unbuilding of Historic Neighbourhoods in Post-Katrina New Orleans, Journal of Urban Design 14 (2009): 258.

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What Are The Techniques for Survival? | Infrastructure + Economy The City at Sea is a true engineering feat drawing upon existing naval design to understand how to make a city float at sea. Original plans included having the city attach to the power grid of New Orleans during non-hurricane seasons, and only withdrawing into the ocean when a threat arises. However, engineers quickly realized the model has to become selfsustaining. The transportation, water supply, energy supply, and communication model must all be considered. The transportation of the floating city draws upon the existing streetcar system of New Orleans. The entire city would have an overlying streetcar system through it that can grow with the city. However, there are currently no proposals for cars or other systems as they would not be able to withstand the wave forces. Furthermore, the energy would be drawn from cruise ship design ideas by embedding power systems in the floating platforms.22 This would allow a constant flow of energy, completely detached from the mainland grid, such that each platform can be self-sufficient when the city disperses. Other ideas include using wind energy, but these have not yet been fully developed. Another key element to human survival is the water supply. Each platform would consist of a cleansing system that provides water to the residents that live on it.23 Together, this infrastructure of the city would be adaptable to grow with the city. Finally, one must also consider the very nature of the city and how it will continue to survive economically. In pre-Katrina New Orleans and post-Katrina New Orleans, tourism continues to be the driving force of the economy. 24 Post-Katrina, the French Quarter was the first area re-developed such that the government could continue to make money. Therefore, in the floating city proposal, architects considered recreating the district of the French Quarter to keep the economy afloat. Analysis of this Dream | They Arent The Only Ones Getting it Wrong, A Political Diversion Tactic The City at Sea image is unrealistic in its dream-like visions of a self-sustaining floating city. Indeed, we already have cruise ships which are self-sustaining floating cities in themselves. But these are merely temporary structures, not places people live permanently. The whole narrative of looking at cruise ships as precedent is worrisome as cruise-ships are known to be places for vacation where one is living in a state of a dream world, not in a place they would ever call home. Furthermore, the narrative of a self-sustainable City at Sea ceases to consider the real problems facing the city of New Orleans. The term self-sustainability is hot in design topics today, and therefore seems like a good selling point of the design. However, is this narrative and the entire design that focuses on the economy of the French Quarter just a political diversion tactic? As 80% of the city flooded from Katrina, government officials quickly considered how to deal with the disaster and started to rebuild the French Quarter first so that the economy of New Orleans could stay afloat. In the few months following Katrina, media coverage shifted away as the only images that were shown were of the French Quarter creating an illusion that everything had gone back to normal and was picture-perfect. Sadly, the reality was quite different. It was as if the government had chosen a political diversion tactic. With the proposals for the Ideal City on water this appears to be happening again. The images make everything appear as if it will be able to be normal again while blatantly ignoring the current issues in the existing New Orleans. This idea is captured in a part of a poem I wrote while visiting New Orleans two years after Katrina where I wrote:

22 23 24

City at Sea, Mega-Engineering. City at Sea, Mega-Engineering. New Orleans, Louisiana Profile, City Data 14 Dec. 2011.

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Brick staircases that tolerated the hurricane still stand, marking an entry to a sprawling, empty land, but visions of damage are erased from the news board, as the urgency to rebuild becomes ignored, Katrina is forgotten. The diversion tactics by government to ignore the real issues facing the real city can best be understood by the moments Post-Katrina when officials waived existing contracts of Historical Preservation and allowed the destruction of hundreds of homes if they seemed unsafe for public 25 health. It seemed that the city was hell-bent on rebuilding the city by first tearing much of it 26 down. As the government ignored community needs and focused on rebuilding the global image of New Orleans, or at least the side that tourists tend to see, the rest of the city was forgotten. The City at Sea is continuing this tactic by re-creating the French Quarter and ignoring the rest of the unique neighbourhood diversity and culture of New Orleans. An overlooked history of Post-Katrina redevelopment is the New Orleanians who created neighbourhood developments while the government stood on the sidelines. It was these residents who proved the cities resilience post-Katrina by bonding together and fighting for community-development that focused on the micro-scale and kept in touch with reality. The City at Sea has yet to look at this microurbanistic scale only proposing zoning of general neighbourhood schemes and the re-creation of the economical base for the French Quarter. But what about the Lower Ninth Ward that has such a strong historical history? When planners only consider the macro-scale and put the people as secondary, it is unclear of whether it will succeed. The only thing that is clear is that the selfsustainable and economy narratives create a faade that diverts attention away from the real issues facing the Ideal City design, as well as those unresolved in New Orleans.

25 26

Verderber, Unbuilding of Historic Neighbourhoods, 269. Verderber, Unbuilding of Historic Neighbourhoods, 268

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Is the Crescent City Culture Going to Be Lost at Sea? The social life on the City at Sea aims to re-create the New Orleans charm of jazz, festivals, the French Quarter, and Creole-style living. Through methods of re-implementing aspects of the Creole culture and the urban fabric of the existing New Orleans, the City at Sea hopes to keep the Crescent City culture alive. In terms of the Creole culture, the new floating city has proposed to include the streetcar system as the means of transport. The streetcar system is infamous in New Orleans as a deeprooted part of the cultural history of the city. In addition, the City at Sea design draws upon the importance of seafood in the cultural history of New Orleans by proposing a city that thrives on a fishing economy. This has to do with the fact that seafood is a strong part of the daily life of New Orleanians who often feast on Po-Boys and crawdaddys. The proposed city also attempts to recapture the aura of New Orleans through its urban fabric. The cast-iron balconies of the French Quarter are recreated and the residential quarters and downtown are divided, as they continue to be in modern-day New Orleans. However, the design proposal does not give any further illusion as to what the nature of the city may entail in terms of recapturing the social fabric of the city and the urban typologies of buildings such as shotgun homes that are deeply rooted in the cultural history of New Orleans. Analysis of This Attitude As much as bringing elements of the New Orleans culture to the floating city may appear to re-create New Orleans, it actually does the opposite. The City at Sea will feel like it is not a place that the residents can call home. This brings up issues of the psychology of architecture and planning. If a former resident of New Orleans is asked to live on a floating city block, simply seeing a streetcar is not going to trigger a sense of home. As John Campanella puts it, cities are more than the sum of their buildings....a city is a tapestry of human 27 lives and social networks that are essential to the heart and soul of the place. Looking at the Floating City through an idealistic lens creates ignorance towards what really matters: the residents who bring the place to life. In Pre-Katrina New Orleans, neighbourhoods in New Orleans were each uniquely divided by a combination of political occurrences in history such as slave labor, and municipal government decisions on neighbourhood divides. The result was a unique human diversity in New Orleans with western New Orleans being predominately white, and eastern New Orleans 28 being predominantly black. Certain neighbourhoods became known for having a stronger black community, whereas others became typically white neighbourhoods. One such black neighbourhood is the Lower Ninth Ward, which exists along the Industrial Canal and was protected by a levee wall that breached during Katrina. Historically, the neighbourhood had a very strong sense of community as it was only connected to central New Orleans by one main bridge 29 and had cheap living with job opportunities nearby in the industrial harbor. However, postKatrina the area was almost 100% unlivable and with many residents never returning the city remains greatly underdeveloped. An area with such a strong history cannot just be abandoned, but it also cannot be re-created. A new Lower Ninth Ward would require an entire new history to be written about the working class and social divide. But perhaps it is this that the new ideal wants, a bit of a political agenda in which the opportunity is seen as one to ignore the existing problems and racial divides in New Orleans and start from scratch. Furthermore, the building form of the floating city fails to capture the rich urban fabric of New Orleans. Although the iron-cast balconies typical of the French Quarter are re-captured, the
27

Thomas Campanella, Recovering New Orleans in Planetizen Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning (Washington, DC: Island, 2007), 113. 28 Kristin Feireiss and Brad Pitt, Architecture in Times of Need: Make It Right Rebuilding New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward, (Munich: Prestel, 2009), 42. 29 Feireiss and Pitt, Architecture in Times of Need, 41.

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Lisa Hinderdael MArch Urban Design 11-12 architectural traditions engrained in the history of New Orleans are not. The urban fabric of New Orleans captures the citys growth patterns from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and can be traced in the differing mix of types and styles of residential architecture the divisions which are 30 so clear. For example, the shotgun houses in New Orleans symbolize the struggles and history 31 of the working class in New Orleans. These urban typologies have been ignored in the tabula rasa design. But even if they did build shotgun houses on the floating city, they would not mean anything. Removing the building typology from its local grounding would mean re-creating a 32 picture post-card New Orleans, not a living landscape. It is these struggles and concerns that suggest New Orleans cannot just be moved to a City at Sea, and that the problems that need to be considered are on the local scale. Those residents who lived in post-Katrina New Orleans will never feel at home in a city design that ignores their social history completely. But this becomes a dilemma as a social history can never be rewritten. The public realm is becoming ignored and social infrastructure is not being considered. By focusing on the tourist areas in the ideal city, and ignoring the residents of former New Orleans and their unique culture, the new floating city can no longer truly be called NAwlins.

30 31

Karen Kingsley, New Orleans Architecture: Building Renewal, Journal of American History 94 (2007): 724. Dell Upton, Understanding New Orleans Architectural Ecology, in Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina, ed. Eugenie L. Birch et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 276. 32 Upton, Architectural Ecology, 286.

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Alternative Solutions at Play | Rural Studios vs. Celebrity Homes Understanding the nature of the city and that simply relocating the city of New Orleans to a City at Sea is a politically expedient process that ignores the real issues at hand, some people have turned to micro-scale solutions. The most prominent example of this is the URBANbuild program at Tulane University and the work of some non-profits such as Make it Right in the Lower Ninth Ward and Habitat for Humanitys Musicians Village in the Upper Ninth Ward. These proposals are facing the issues of New Orleans head-on and appear to be the alternate solution that considers social infrastructure. The idea of Rural Studios began at Auburn University in 1992 with the aim of being an 33 architecture all about the people. Samuel Mockbee took a group of students under his wing yearly and began to develop community-based projects in the small town of Hale County, 34 Alabama. Although these projects were happening at the rural scale, they were crossing new boundaries in social engagement and architecture. The question that followed was whether these same principles can be practiced at the urban scale. In the summer of 2005, just before Hurricane Katrina, Tulane University established URBANbuild URBANbuild is focused in New Orleans and can be seen as an alternative solution that may be the right one as compared to the City at Sea design. The projects of the studio are not idealistic but rather design-build projects put into practice and interspersed throughout the city. Students are asked to design new homes for neighbourhoods in New Orleans to revitalize the 35 rich cultural and architectural heritage of the city. When Katrina hit in 2005, URBANbuild knew it had to act fast to save its local community. The challenge was to define a contemporary 36 vernacular while still respecting the architectural history of New Orleans. One example of their work is called Build 1 and located in the neighbourhood of Treme. The design draws upon the typical shotgun houses of New Orleans past and continues the tradition of making the street side public; while creating a more modern look. Unlike the City at Sea ideal design that ignores the architectural history, the urban studio projects are inserted into historic neighbourhoods, and the 37 houses fit well; as they are respectful of tradition while acknowledging their own era. The designs consider the neighbourhood scale and do not ignore the nature of the city today.

Figure 4. URBANbuild Build 1 Home in Treme

On the contrary, certain micro-solutions are cause for concern. In the Lower Ninth Ward, Brad Pitt began the Make it Right Foundation which has re-built 17 homes in the area flooded by 38 Katrina. However, the designs are all done by architecture firms that are not New Orleans
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Andrea O. Dean and Timothy Hursley, Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency (New York: Princeton Architectural, 2002), 2. 34 Andrea O.Dean and Timothy Hursley, Proceed and Be Bold: Rural Studio After Samuel Mockbee (New York: Princeton Architectural, 2002), 7. 35 URBANbuild, http://tulaneurbanbuild.com. 36 URBANbuild. 37 Kingsley, New Orleans Architecture, 724. 38 Make it Right, http://www.makeitright.nola.org.

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Lisa Hinderdael MArch Urban Design 11-12 based, and therefore dont fully understand the real cultural heritage of the region. These firms 39 create what some have called a gated, un-gated community. Whereas the Lower Ninth Ward pre-Katrina was a lively neighbourhood, the Make it Right homes take up a particular region of the landscape and exclude certain members of society. The type-casting of the area loses the neighbourhood feel of diversity that is so typical of New Orleans cultural history. In essence, these alternatives are better than the City at Sea, and are a closer to what New Orleans needs. They reconsider the social infrastructure of the city over the macro-design and re-establish neighborhood dynamics. But we must be careful to turn fully to small-scale design projects as some are creating closed societies instead of tight-knit neighbourhoods.

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Erin Waskom, Community, Spirit, and Soul in the Lower Ninth Ward (Masters thesis, University of Maryland, 2010).

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Conclusion | We Cannot Recreate NAwlins Hurricane Katrina presented New Orleans with an opportunity that few cities ever have: 40 the chance to plan and rebuild on a tabula rasa. However, these large economies-of-scale 41 utopian ideals do not capture the essence that is New Orleans. The dream of a City at Sea may work if it is here that a new city forms, from scratch; but trying to relocate a city ignores the social and cultural landscape of which it is a part. The narrative of self-sustainability and an economy based on the French Quarter are simply tactics to cover up the real issues facing the city. New 42 Orleans as a City at Sea will slip into a kind of glamorous but irrelevant afterlife. The residents of New Orleans pre-Katrina have suffered traumatic experiences, coming home to completely demolished homes that were deemed unlivable, forcing them to relocate throughout the United States. Indeed, then, providing and opportunity to relocate to a floating city would not seem appealing. The attachment to home would be lost, the jazz music played but the aura gone. As Urban studios work towards solving this re-creation of the cultural landscape and social infrastructure, we have to consider if maybe this is the better solution or if it still has flaws. As Times-Picayune writer Martha Carr puts it : Ill leave you with this one request: dont forget our 43 city. And dont let your leaders forget us either.

Word Count: 5022

40 41 42 43

Ramroth, Planning for Disaster, 226. Upton, Architectural Ecology, 287. Campanella, Recovering New Orleans, 115. Eugenie B. Ladner and Susan M.Wachter, Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster, 4.

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Lisa Hinderdael MArch Urban Design 11-12 REFERENCE LIST LITERATURE Birch, Eugenie L., and Susan M. Wachter. Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2006. Campanella, Thomas. "Recovering New Orleans." In Planetizen Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning, edited by Abhijeet Chavan. Washington, DC: Island, 2007. Chavan, Abhijeet. Introduction to Planetizen Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning, 106-108. Washington, DC: Island, 2007. Dean, Andrea O., and Timothy Hursley. Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency. New York: Princeton Architectural, 2002. Dean, Andrea O., and Timothy Hursley. Proceed and Be Bold: Rural Studio After Samuel Mockbee. New York: Princeton Architectural, 2005. Feireiss, Kristin, and Brad Pitt. Architecture in Times of Need: Make It Right Rebuilding New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward. Munich: Prestel, 2009. Lin, Zhongjie. Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan. New York: Routledge, 2010. Lynch, Kevin. Good City Form. Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1984. Moos, David, and Gail A. Trechsel. Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community Architecture. Birmingham, Ala.: Birmingham Museum of Art, 2003. Olthuis, Koen, and David Keuning. Float!: Building on Water to Combat Urban Congestion and Climate Change. Amsterdam: Frame, 2010. Ramroth, William G. Planning for Disaster: How Natural and Man-made Disasters Shape the Built Environment. New York: Kaplan Publishing, 2007. Salsbury, Patrick. "Distributed Floating Cities: A Laboratory for Exploring Social Utopias." In Viable Utopian Ideas: Shaping a Better World, edited by Arthur B. Shostak, 99-102. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2003. Steinberg, Philip E., and Rob Shields. What Is a City?: Rethinking the Urban after Hurricane Katrina. Athens: University of Georgia, 2008. Upton, Dell. "Understanding New Orleans' Architectural Ecology." In Rebuilding Urban Places after Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina, edited by Eugenie L. Birch, and Susan M. Wachter, 275-87. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2006. Vale, Lawrence J., and Thomas J. Campanella. The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. THESIS Waskom, Erin. Community, Spirit, and Soul in the Lower Ninth Ward. Masters thesis., University of Maryland, 2010).

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Lisa Hinderdael MArch Urban Design 11-12 JOURNALS + MAGAZINES Kingsley, Karen. New Orleans Architecture: Building Renewal. Journal of American History 94 (2007): 716-25. Neville, Jason, and Geoff Coats. Urban Design and Civil Society in New Orleans: Challenges, Opportunities, and Strategies in the Post-Flood Design Moment. Journal of Urban Design 14.3 (2009): 309-324. Shroder, Mark D. Design and Disaster: Higher Education Responds to Hurricane Katrina. Cityscape 10.3 (2008). Turnbull, Andy. Ocean-Grown Homes. Popuiar Mechanics (1997): 54-57. Verderber, Stephen. The Unbuilding of Historic Neighbourhoods in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Journal of Urban Design 14 (2009): 257-77. Verderber, Stephen, Breeze Glazer, and Rodney Dionisio. Leed and the Design/Build Experience: A Shelter for Homeless Families Returning to Post-Katrina New Orleans. International Journal of Architectural Research 5.1 (2011). WEBSITES + BLOGS DesignBuzz. 15 Floating Structures Staring in the Face of the Future. http://www.designbuzz.com/entry/15-floating-structures-staring-in-the-face-of-thefuture.html. Make it Right. Accessed January 2, 2012, http://www.makeitright.nola.org. NCDC: National Climatic Data Center. "Hurricane Katrina." Accessed November 22, 2011, http://ncdc.noaa.gov/special-reports/katrina.html. City-Data. New Orleans, Louisiana Profile. Accessed December 4, 2011, http://www.city-data.com/city/New-Orleans-Louisiana.html. URBANbuild: Tulane University. Accessed January 2, 2012. http://tulaneurbanbuild.com/. TELEVISION PROGRAMS "City at Sea." Mega Engineering. Discovery Channel. June 8, 2009. ILLUSTRATION LIST Figure 1. Tokyo Bay Design by Kenzo Tange. DesignBuzz. 15 Floating Structures Staring in the Face of the Future. http://www.designbuzz.com/entry/15-floating-structures-starting-inthe-face-of-disaster.html. Figure 2. Autopia Ampere Design by Wolf Hilbertz. DesignBuzz. 15 Floating Structures Staring in the Face of the Future. http://www.designbuzz.com/entry/15-floating-structures-startingin-the-face-of-disaster.html. Figure 3. Shanghai World Expo Design by Dutch Firm. DesignBuzz. 15 Floating Structures Staring in the Face of the Future. http://www.designbuzz.com/entry/15-floatingstructures-starting-in-the-face-of-disaster.html. Figure 4. URBANbuild Build 1 Home in Treme. URBANbuild. http://tulaneurbanbuild.com/. Cover Images. Movie Stills from City at Sea. Mega-Engineering. Discovery Channel.

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