Historic shotgun houses are a common sight in New Orleans. In the urban “sliver by the river”, located roughly one hundred miles from where the Mississippi enters the Gulf of Mexico, available land was and is a finite resource. Properties were divided into very slim lots with narrow frontage facing the river. This was of decisive importance in the days when the Mississippi was the main means of transportation and characterizes the urban fabric of the city to this day.

When mechanical drainage allowed the development of the swamps along the former urban fringe, the “back-of-town”, African Americans found new places to live. However, their opportunities were severely limited due to racial segregation and legalized discrimination. The only available option for many African Americans were poor neighborhoods or slums, characterized by low quality of residential space, absent amenities, and lacking infrastructure. Against this background, the shotgun house became an affordable solution to the housing demands of citizens with low income or limited access to resources.

Different theories about the historic origins of shotgun houses

Different theories exist regarding the historic origins of shotgun houses, either based on the indigenous population’s way of life before the Europeans arrived, cultural ties to the Caribbean, comparable historic examples in Europe, or local developments that mirror existing types based on circumstances of need, use, climate, context, and available resources. In its most basic configuration, a shotgun house is a one-story dwelling with a ratio of length to width of 10 to 1. This slim proportion perfectly utilizes the long lots in the city with their narrow frontage and deep backyards.

All have one myth in common

The typical shotgun features a linear arrangement of rooms without a separate corridor. Rooms are accessed one by one through successive doorways. This arrangement led to a common myth: if all doors are open, a shotgun can be fired from the front porch through the house out the back without hitting a wall. Suitable for prefabrication, they typically consist of wood frames covered in wood siding and became particularly popular following the 1890s. Historic shotguns were built raised on stumps, while later models were built slab-on-grade, offering no protection against floods.

Shotgun houses are optimized for a particular way of life that doesn’t require strict privacy when walking through one room to the next. Some are retrofit to include a corridor. Two units combined under one roof become a “double shotgun”. Adding a second story on top produces a “camelback shotgun”. They can feature ornamentation and elaborate woodwork, particularly on their front facades. Handed down within families from one generation to the next, they gained a strong symbolic and cultural meaning for New Orleanians and shape the cityscape to this day.

Historic preservation is of key importance

Given New Orleans’ persistent cultural image and context, historic preservation is of key importance. Organizations such as the Preservation Resource Center assisted post-disaster rebuilding efforts based on the reuse of existing materials and artifacts. Duany Plater-Zyberk, well known for their “New Urbanism” approach to architecture and urban design, built contemporary interpretations of historic shotgun houses in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans. The Make It Right initiative proposed contemporary design versions that were intended to showcase how modern architecture can contribute to the post-Katrina recovery of the city.

The likelihood is high that shotgun houses will remain a characteristic element of the cityscape of New Orleans. Over time, they have become attractive to a wider audience, captured by the charm this architectural type possesses. In recent years, gentrification created problems for local residents who can’t keep up with rising rents. Currently, social media and tourism driven short-term housing contributes to increases in property values that are difficult to stomach for residents who rely on affordable urban housing. Whether shotgun houses can keep their promise of affordability in the Mississippi metropolis remains to be seen.

Sources:

• Campanella R. (2006): Geographies of New Orleans – Urban Fabrics Before the Storm. Lafayette: Center For Louisiana Studies.
• Colten C. (2005): An Unnatural Metropolis. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
• Frampton K. (1993): Grundlagen der Architektur, Studien zur Kultur des Tektonischen. München-Stuttgart: Oktagon Verlag.
• Horne J. (2006): Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the near death of a great American 

topos 105 contains an article about LaToya Cantrell, the first female mayor of New Orleans. She led the recovery of one of the city’s neighborhoods after Hurricane Katrina. Our author discusses the question: Can she facilitate the coordination, cooperation and funding that are critical for achieving the city’s resilience towards future disasters? Accompanying the print article, we present a five-part series on our website.

The fourth part is about the Transition Water Plan and the aim to redefine the way people in the city live with the water, and not against it.

The new Mayor of New Orleans, LaToya Cantrell, and her administration orient their policies on a plan created by actors from civil society, higher education, and business, including volunteers, experts and community members. The “Transition Plan” outlines what needs to be done in the city in the fields of infrastructure, economic development, and neighborhood stabilization.

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It also serves to create a sense of trust among the population that the city knows how to respond to future floods. The aim is to redefine the way people in the city live with the water, and not against it. Previous strategies of removing water from public life through floodwalls also deprived the citizenship of any positive environmental qualities that rivers, lakes or ponds offer. Can New Orleans reconcile the idea of “living with water” with the need for flood risk adaptation or avoidance?

As an umbrella organization for related efforts, the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans, founded in 2014, serves to facilitate the cooperation between actors of various sectors in order to promote and implement practices aimed at sustainable water management. One particular measure is included in the updated building code and requires property owners to individually manage the first 1.25 inches of stormwater they incur. This is very much in line with the notion of individual risk management responsibilities as opposed to collective risk protection, a general paradigm shift in policy that is taking place in Europe as well. Another step is to strengthen the city’s institutions in order to further a collaborative atmosphere between departments and support current resilient urban planning efforts.

“The intention is to achieve not only flood resilience, but also a broad economic and social impact”

The formulation of the Urban Water Plan and its principles and visions contributed to winning a 140 million dollar award from the National Disaster Resilience Competition for implementing projects in the city, such as the Mirabeau Water Garden. The intention is to achieve not only flood resilience, but also a broad economic and social impact – by reducing both flood insurance costs and the actual damages resulting from floods. With hundreds of millions of dollars intended for green infrastructure projects in the city during this legislative period, the aim is also to create jobs for the city’s unemployed residents and businesses, especially those with a minority or African-American background.

topos 105 contains an article about LaToya Cantrell, the first female mayor of New Orleans. She led the recovery of one of the city’s neighborhoods after Hurricane Katrina. Our author discusses the question: Can she facilitate the coordination, cooperation and funding that are critical for achieving the city’s resilience towards future disasters? Accompanying the print article, we present a five-part series on our website.

The third part is about the sense, benefits and associated problems with and through the Louisiana’s Road Home program.

A catastrophic failure of initiative took place during the response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, due to institutional fragmentation and decision-making across multiple tiers of government. The failed interplay between state and local institutions shaped the character of recovery programs and, as a direct result, hampered rebuilding efforts in hard-hit areas of the city. The limited capacity of African-American citizens to respond to disaster and rebuild their homes was even reinforced by recovery program requirements.

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Highest percentage of buyouts citywide

After Katrina, the state of Louisiana proposed an action plan to help homeowners recover from the severe storm impact and the failure of flood protection structures. Louisiana’s Road Home program was developed to provide financial support for rebuilding based on existing property values. Due to federal intervention, the program was changed to include a buyout option to compensate homeowners, particularly those who couldn’t rebuild. Renters weren’t represented in adequate ways and only with regards to private owners of rental properties. Road Home applicants struggled with difficulties related to low property values and an over-reliance on recovery grants due to lacking financial resources. Residents of poor, black neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward were clearly disadvantaged, and their problems with the Road Home program contributed to an above-average number of buyouts and the highest percentage of buyouts citywide.

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Stabilization of local rebuilding rates

Many of these buyout lots are categorized as “blighted” properties. They feature deserted or damaged buildings, are vacant or unkept – all the more problematic in a subtropical climate, where vegetation grows quickly and invites rodents. The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority is responsible for planning strategies aimed at the many properties where owners failed to recover. The Lot Next Door program was developed to enable residents to purchase neighboring, vacant properties. This allowed the stabilization of local rebuilding rates and an increase in value of consolidated properties. Many vacant lots perform badly on the real estate market, and market-based solutions seldom apply. Currently, the aim is to include alternative criteria other than price into the purchasing process to protect owners. The empty lots also find alternative uses and become water gardens or urban farming locations.

topos 105 contains an article about LaToya Cantrell, the first female mayor of New Orleans. She led the recovery of one of the city’s neighborhoods after Hurricane Katrina. Our author discusses the question: Can she facilitate the coordination, cooperation and funding that are critical for achieving the city’s resilience towards future disasters? Accompanying the print article, we present a five-part series on our website.

The second part is about what the city lost in the hurricane and why disaster recovery is a dilemma in many ways.

New Orleans was founded 300 years ago on the natural high ground along the Mississippi river. In the 1900s, the swamps between the former urban fringe and Lake Pontchartrain in the north were mechanically drained and urbanized, creating areas that subsided below sea level. In 2005 Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the city’s flood protection system, deeply submerging low-lying areas. The massive scale of destruction of homes became central to the rebuilding efforts in the city after the hurricane. Initial confusion over planning recommendations in combination with the local government’s laissez-faire attitude to recovery were met with strong opposition from citizens and nonprofit organizations.

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Residents of areas such as the Lower Ninth Ward struggled to recover and rebuild. It was subject to dramatic levels of destruction due to the breach of the Industrial Canal floodwall. Most individual rebuilding activities remained ad-hoc and without broader coordination into an inclusive and sustainable process. From the Mississippi river northwards, the Lower Ninth Ward dissolved into an irregular pattern of recovery efforts amidst a green sea of vacant properties. The area’s strong local identity disintegrated into a pluralism of new normals of those who returned or those who moved to other neighborhoods or out-of-town. Residents willing to rebuild received assistance from non-profit organizations such as lowernine.org, Make It Right or the Preservation Resource Center.

Recovery after disaster poses a dilemma in many ways. Quickness is essential to facilitate return and promote inclusive and sustainable planning. However, a quick return to normal may also lead to reestablishing past vulnerabilities. The recovery of the Lower Ninth Ward was hampered by the disconnect between rebuilding plans and programs and the vulnerability of local residents. Vulnerable neighborhoods that were experiencing difficulties before disaster principally require approaches aimed at “building back better” – to become resilient by reducing vulnerability, key to rebuilding cities after disaster.

topos 105 contains an article about LaToya Cantrell, the first female mayor of New Orleans. She led the recovery of one of the city’s neighborhoods after Hurricane Katrina. Our author discusses the question: Can she facilitate the coordination, cooperation and funding that are critical for achieving the city’s resilience towards future disasters? Accompanying the print article, we present a five-part series on our website.

The first part deals with the cityscape of New Orleans, which before and independently of Katrina was already marked by social vulnerability that can be traced within the urban fabric.

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New Orleans, the “Crescent City”, the “Sliver by the River”, currently celebrates its 300th anniversary. August 29th also marked the thirteenth year after Hurricane Katrina triggered a catastrophic disaster in the city, followed by a dysfunctional response and a flawed recovery. Before Katrina, New Orleans was already scarred by racial inequalities and social vulnerabilities that can be retraced within the urban fabric, indicating who lives in which neighborhood and why. The flood evacuation and resulting nationwide diaspora led to a dramatic decline in the number of residents. Recently the city reached 90 percent of its pre-Katrina population count, some neighborhoods even report population growth. Yet the share of African Americans is lower, and the departure of poor and black residents after Katrina has changed the face of the city.

New strategies

Some of the lessons learned after Katrina include the realization that disasters aren’t “natural”, but rather the conjunction of at-risk settlement patterns, flawed planning, and vulnerability. This recognition also contributed to developing new strategies aimed at strengthening resilience. Formerly active in supporting the recovery of Broadmoor, one of the city’s neighborhoods, the new Mayor of New Orleans, LaToya Cantrell, is experienced in such efforts.

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True to the context

The previous imperative of controlling nature is challenged by interdisciplinary and integrated planning approaches with social and environmental orientation. While flood resilience can be enhanced by taking into account the everyday life of residents, it also has an achilles’ heel: the social vulnerability of the population, related to poverty and lacking equality of opportunity. Planners and designers therefore have the responsibility to develop ethical and adequate solutions for resilient architecture, cities and landscapes – true to the context and based on collaboration and innovation.

To be continued…

Read the article about how LaToya Cantrell fights the consequences of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in topos 105.

The Lower Ninth Rebirth tour is a bike tour through the district Lower Ninth Ward in the east of New Orleans, organized by the Confederacy of Cruisers. No other neighborhood was hit as hard as this by Hurricane Katrina. While the 2016 ASLA Meeting presents different solutions for resilient coastal landscapes, discusses current challenges and new best practices at the final day of 2016 ASLA Meeting, the Topos Magazine skipped the program for some hours and went on the bike tour – not only to hear what happened to the city but rather to see it.

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Until 2005 the Lower Ninth Ward was a completely developed residential neighborhood of New Orleans with grocery stores, saloons, schools, streets and sidewalks. But when Hurricane Katrina made landfall just east of the city, multiple breaches in the levees resulted in catastrophic storm surge floods. The district was completely flooded. At its lowest point, the neighborhood is four feet below sea level – these areas were most devastated by the storm. In five minutes the water rose up to 15 meters in certain places. Thousands of people lost their homes – most of a lower income class.

The evacuation went slowly, the federal government and the municipality were unable to react fast and efficient enough. When Hurricane Rita hit one month later in 2005, the Lower Ninth Ward was flooded again. Afterwards 41 non-profit organizations came to work in the district. Without any development plan, the first houses were rebuilt again. Not until 2014, nine years after the flood, the City of New Orleans announced “The City of New Orleans will soon begin repairing Katrina-damaged roads and infrastructure in your neighborhood”. Only 36.7 percent of the population came back. Till today there is no grocery store in the district.

More info on the bike tour

One might think that a conference like the 2016 ASLA Meeting & EXPO gets boring with time – but not in “The Big Easy“. The reason for this is certainly the city itself: Most difficult to classify because of its great diversity in architecture, public spaces, people and music, New Orleans is full of surprises. The ASLA program reacts to this. In the context of current developments, the schedule discusses challenges on site as well as in the general field of landscape architecture. So even on the third day, there is still a lot to discover.

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“A celebration of place“ – this is the theme of this year’s ASLA Meeting in New Orleans. According to some attendees’ descriptions, the name not only speaks for itself. It speaks for the whole city – its history, its development.
The“Krewe of Boo“ is the official Halloween Parade in New Orleans, which typically takes place on the Saturday evening before Halloween. While turning the Vieux Carre (French Quarter) into the“Boo Carre“, the parade progresses through the French Quarter all the way up to the Convention Center. With camp chairs in their hands, the people of New Orleans come early to secure top spots to watch the parade of ghost on horses, dancing witches and indescribable scary characters. While the parade progresses and throws necklaces and sweets into the crowd, the people in the streets shout, laugh, sing and dance.
Even though the parade is no official part of the 2016 ASLA conference, considered altogether, there is a very important learning value: This city, kind of broken after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, was not only backed up again by the government or the community – it was mainly backed up by the people of New Orleans.

Mirabeau Water Garden

The project Mirabeau Water Garden in the north of New Orleans is a very good example for the civil involvement after Katrina. It was presented on the third day of 2016 ASLA Bry Sarte, David Waggonner and Shannon Blakeman. Before the hurricane, 25 acres in the neighborhood of Gentilly were the home of the motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Joseph. Because of the low sea level on site, the place was nearly completely destroyed in 2005. To morph the fallow land into a water mitigation pilot, a community park and educational outlet, the community of 500 religious women donated it to the city of New Orleans in January 2016. Like this the $25 million project became part of the “Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan“ and will be funded partially by the municipality. Detailed report to be followed.

From 21th to 24th October the 2016 ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO takes places in New Orleans. While meeting in Louisiana, obviously, one topic has top priority: resilient coastal landscapes. Nevertheless ASLA proves a diversity of other up-to-date topics.

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The ‘Great Deluge’, the consequences of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 affected more than 80 per cent of New Orleans’ surface. The city known for its Laissez-faire-mentality, the Jazz and Mardi Gras experienced a big depression not only in development but also in its economy, ecology, technical and social infrastructure. Years of rebuilding and revitalization followed – every action with the aim of preventing the next flood.

Revitalization project “Lafitte Greenway”

One of these projects is the Lafitte Greenway, a green corridor between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi. Parallel to ten other ASLA education sessions Daniel R. Samuels (AIA, friends of lafitte greenway) presented the revitalization project in New Orleans this morning and highlighted the power of cooperation between different stakeholders.
After Katrina, the former railway road was no-man’s-land. But thanks to the partnership between ASLA and the National Park Service’s Rivers, Trails and Conservation Programm, we now find here a 2.6 mile bike and pedestrian trail which connects two of New Orleans’ largest parks as well as multiple neighborhoods. But the cooperation of the resident-based group ‘friends of lafitte greenway’ shows the real success of the project. Thanks to working very closely with residents, professionals and the municipality, the organization was part of this process from the beginning. Nowadays the group continues to pursue the greenway’s aims to create a safe greenway which links the neighborhoods and to establish a green corridor with sport, health and gardening offers.

2016 ASLA offers diversity

Besides revitalization solutions, ASLA’s programme today made clear that the event in New Orleans is more than just ‘Rethinking Katrina’ – we talked about new ways of bringing healthy food to urban communities as well as how linking Big Data with Community Scale Resiliency could help to improve climate adaptation tools. We are really looking forward to tomorrow’s programme!

The sun is hidden away by darkening skies and a faint drizzle starts to fall. Suddenly my cellphone lights up: Flash Flood Warning. The rain starts pouring down and everybody out on foot starts to run for cover. From the white-painted window in a café I can see the manhole covers dancing on jets of water. New Orleans is in the same predicament as the Netherlands, it’s below sea-level, the entire downpour has to be pumped out. While at the end of the 19th century the drainage system managed to handle 85 per cent of the rainfall, today all the buildings and roads have reduced this capacity to 20 per cent. And now not only New Orleans but also the US government brings in Dutch experts in order to cope with the effects of global warming.

Although it’s almost ten years since Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 per cent of the city, with 103,000 lost homes, New Orleans is still far from being rebuilt. Architect and critic Michael Sorkin has, together with Carol McMichael Reese and Anthony Fontenot, assembled an imposingly rich anthology of voices in New Orleans Under Reconstruction: The Crisis of Planning. Along with a thorough, in-depth description of a variety of mostly green projects, which range from privately founded ones like Brad Pitt’s Make it Right, university initiated ones focusing on rebuilding and cultural landscaping, to the city’s so-called Goody Clancy master plan, the 544-page book gives an insight into the challenges of urban planning today, with in-depth analysis by the likes of Christine Boyer, David Dixon, Laura Kurgan, Byron Mouton and many others. Urban sociologist Mike Davis is, as usual, excellent when talking about demography, racism, economics and planning when in the foreword he states that 40 per cent of the New Orleans population, mainly Afro-Americans, has been forced into exile. The politically forced shrinking of the city’s socio-economical footprint was also an important part of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, from which a chapter is reprinted, describing the way business leaders and others tried to bypass the city council. Former mayor Ray Nagin, sentenced to ten years in prison for corruption, stated his own version of the war on poverty in an interview for the AP just after Katrina: “As a practical matter, these poor folks don’t have the resources to go back to our city, just like they didn’t have the resources to get out of our city. So we won’t get all those folks back. That’s not what I want, it’s just a fact.” But New Orleans is not an ordinary city, the protests were strong and Fats Domino’s defiant sign “Save Our Neighborhood: No Bulldozing!” is still up at Holy Cross in the vulnerable, low–lying Lower Ninth Ward. New Urbanism’s Andrés Duany writes that Chicago was rebuilt three years after the big fire 1871, but in New Orleans rebuilding hadn’t even started a year later. It took FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) nine months to decide which areas could be rebuilt, a slowness paired with rushed demolition that caused many people to leave the city once and for all.

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The book shows the richness of plans, but also how planning culture has been left to collapse since the days of Ronald Reagan in a pattern similar to the deregulation of Wall Street. As the rain stops, architect Daniel Winkert, who worked as a city planner before joining John Williams Architects, one of the most active -local offices, joins me. He sits down with a coffee and explains that such a varied and densely populated multicultural city like the old centre of New Orleans would be impossible to build with the suburban zoning code in place today. Planning culture has much to learn, not only with regard to coping with rising sea levels, but also concerning a re-evaluation of modernism. That insight resonates quite well with Michael Sorkin, who in his introduction to the anthology claims that the inability to achieve consensus around a single planning ideal is actually quite good, because it allows for different solutions which, in this case, can mirror New Orleans’ richness of cultural variety.

New Orleans Under Reconstruction: The Crisis of Planning.
Anthony Fontenot, Carol McMichael Reese and Michael Sorkin (eds.)
Verso (New York and London), 2014