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Planning a Stronger City: Ecology, Education, and the Protection of New Orleans

By Tim Campos, Sharlene Leurig, Christopher Lyddy, and Timothy Terway

The existing Lafitte Corridor site (in black and white) and picture showing the proposed improvements.

Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast the week of MIT's orientation for graduate students in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Between welcome events and placement exams, we watched news coverage of a drowning New Orleans. In those images, we saw inescapable illustrations of racial disparity and government negligence. As students of environmental policy and planning, we also noted the lack of public or political dialogue on the preservation of wetlands critical to protecting coastal communities from hurricane damage. Herein lies the problem of rebuilding the Gulf Coast: as long as wetland loss continues, our Gulf cities will be at increased risk of devastation by hurricanes.

Wetlands decrease storm surge and can act like horizontal levees, complementing man-made protective infrastructure.¹ The Dutch, often cited as exemplars of constructed flood protection, have recognized the need to strategically incorporate wetlands into their traditional network of levees and floodgates.² Post-Katrina, much has been made of the need for wetlands protection and reconstruction along the coast. While coastal wetlands yield necessary hurricane protection, we see a need for greater efforts to establish wetlands in cities where significant populations can interact with them and learn how wetlands provide Gulf communities' first line of defense against hurricanes.

From left: Timothy Terway, Sharlene Leurig, and Christopher Lyddy at the project site in New Orleans.

With a grant from the Graduate Student Council and under the guidance of landscape architect Professor Anne Whiston Spirn, we are designing a wetland demonstration project and environmental education park in the heart of New Orleans along the Lafitte Corridor. The park showcases a wetland working with existing pump-and-drain infrastructure to handle the city's daily water management. A meandering boardwalk with interpretive and educational stations guides visitors through the wetland, explaining its role in onsite water control and the larger protective function of wetlands along the coast. Wetlands have long been used to manage water—Frederick Law Olmsted designed the Back Bay Fens to improve the polluted and flood-prone Muddy River, and more recently, wetlands have been integrated with pumping systems to move and treat sewage. Development of the corridor as an educational park serves the dual purpose of enabling residents' interaction with wetlands and providing much-needed green space in a neighborhood still suffering from injurious and negligent urban planning.

We chose the Lafitte Corridor based on its fulfillment of several criteria, including presence of water management infrastructure, local need for green space, and ability to redevelop without residential displacement. We began the selection process by pouring over census data and documents from the city planning commission to understand the assets and needs of city neighborhoods. Our grant funded visits to New Orleans in March and April to assess sites of interest and familiarize ourselves with the city's geography. The Lafitte Corridor emerged from our candidate list as the best place for integrating a wetland into the city fabric while meeting the needs of residents. One of our highest priorities was to disentangle the concepts of open space and displacement, a common perception resulting from early rebuilding plans that called for replacement of low-lying neighborhoods with open space. Development of the corridor requires no residential or business displacement, as the site has been vacant for many years. The corridor is highly symbolic of the city as a whole, both in its dense patchwork of residences and industry and its iconic pumping infrastructure. Industrial facilities, historic shotgun homes, and oak-shaded housing projects line the southwestern half of the corridor. The northwestern segment is distinguished by a brick pumping station and concrete culvert, through which thousands of gallons of untreated stormwater flow every hour to Lake Ponchartrain. The culvert itself, a fourteen-foot deep concrete chasm, abuts single family homes and small businesses. Installation of a wetland along this drainage route would demonstrate the synergy of natural and manmade systems and transform people's backyards from a concrete monolith to a lush linear park.

From left: New Orleans native Tim Campos will help identify local stakeholders in the Lafitte Corridor project.

Establishing a park in the Lafitte Corridor will connect neighborhoods and reclaim open space lost to urban renewal. Oak-lined Claiborne Avenue, the southern border of the Lafitte Corridor, once served as a neighborhood park and main street along which black-owned businesses thrived. The construction of elevated interstate I-10 over Claiborne in the late 1960s destroyed the oak trees and many of the businesses and left the surrounding neighborhoods without a core. Though the city's land use master plan of 1999 envisioned the southwestern half of the corridor as a greenway, the plan never advanced to implementation. Ultimately we hope Lafitte Corridor will serve residents as Claiborne Avenue once did—as a place for families to gather and a nexus between neighborhoods.

The design, implementation, and management of the Lafitte Corridor must be guided by local residents. Too often the city has failed to use public resources in the service of the public interest. Our plan will enable residents to realize the corridor as a neighborhood asset under their management and control, by providing them with options for funding, phasing implementation, financing, and alternative ownership- and governance-structures. Stakeholder engagement has posed the greatest challenge of our project, since many residents and organizations have not returned to the city or have not reoccupied their former locations. Our project has been strengthened by the knowledge of two New Orleans natives, Tim Campos, an architecture masters student, and Jeff Schwartz, an incoming urban planning student at MIT. With their help, we will identify churches, social organizations, and individuals currently formulating rebuilding plans. These neighborhood plans must be provided to the city by this summer to demonstrate neighborhood viability, a prerequisite for receiving vital city services and funding. At a minimum, our plan should assist them in attaining city support. If local organizations conceptualize a park in the Lafitte Corridor as an asset for a larger network of communities, they can choose to carry the project forward as part of the larger rebuilding effort.

We hope our design will inspire other neighborhoods throughout New Orleans to integrate wetlands into their infrastructure and to re-conceptualize vacant land as a community asset. Integrating wetlands into the built environment of New Orleans can establish a precedent for cities in the Gulf Coast and beyond, awakening consciousness of the dependence of cities on natural systems and inspiring greater wetland protection.

¹ Houck, Oliver. "Can We Save New Orleans?" Tulane Environmental Law Journal 19.1 (2006): 1-68.
²Ibid.

Published April 2006.

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