The futures of building are now, and architects across the world are contributing to it. One of them is Mitchell Joachim, the co-founder of Terreform ONE, a nonprofit architectural research group, and Associate Professor of Practice at NYU. The architect and urban designer with degrees from Harvard and Columbia Universities and a PhD in computation from MIT received numerous awards and fellowships, such as the Architizer A+ Award and Time magazine’s Best Invention with MIT Smart Cities Car. He began his career at the offices of Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei, and his design work has been exhibited at MoMA and the Venice Biennale. Topos spoke with him about his practice and his approach to architectural design, questions of resilience, the imaginative power of Science Fiction and designers-as-inventors.

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Topos: Hello Mitchell Joachim, great to have you in Munich! There are a couple of things you’re working on that I’d like to talk about. I had a look at your website, and it seems all things future …
Mitchell Joachim: Websites, they seem to be sprawling …

Websites! All things future, the term resilience, and what the outlook of the architectural and urban design profession is are things I’d like to talk to you about. What do architecture and urban design need to do to move forward? What you would like to achieve with your practice?
We’ve had a thirteen year run so far, which is pretty good. I don’t know what that makes me, mid-career, starting to become something more senior, I don’t know. But we did have a retreat recently, our board of directors, our partners, our cofounders, our executive director. We went someplace Upstate New York and we decided that we need to push ourselves further. There are a lot of folks working on environmental issues in architecture. There are a lot of folks doing sustainability. And that is a good thing. However, we decided that we have to change the game a little bit and be more responsible. We looked at this survey of how we do green in the United States, Europe, and Asia. There is a point system in place, LEED, BREEAM, Living Building Challenge, Energy Star. If you add them all up, and there is a group that did this in Copenhagen, less than 5 percent of those points that you get for being green go towards biodiversity. So, less than 5 percent goes to anything else, any other species or any other part of the landscape. It doesn’t mean it’s bad to get points for using a green facade system. That’s a really good thing. But if you’re killing a lizard or butterfly or if you’re complicit in wiping out some kind of fox or whatever is out there, that’s not good. Especially if you don’t even get points for it. Some of the systems don’t even give points. So, to be more effective in what we’re so passionate about, we decided to change our basic mode of operation. It’s going to be design against extinction. Everything we do serves to stop the destruction of some kind of creature. We looked at the statistics, the stats are sickening. We’ll lose a million of these species by the end of the decade. That’s like every other fish, bird, insect on the planet. We’re apparently in the middle of an insect apocalypse. Development does that. That includes people in real estate, people in planning, people who work in cities and outside of cities and in the suburbs, and not least, architects. We’re all part of this game that is fragmenting territories and destroying creatures. Every seven minutes – by the time we’re done with this interview – six or seven species will be wiped off the face of the earth for good. So, my kids will never see some of these beautiful creatures, even we won’t. We are destroying the world for the next generation. I think if we’re going to fight for something, let’s fight for something specific, the right to life. For other things and beings that don’t have voices. So we retooled our game, not just to work in the environment, that’s already a good thing, but to really focus on how it affects other species. Let’s do something different.

“We decided to change our basic mode of operation. It’s going to be design against extinction.”

If you would have to pick out something material and particular and architecture-related that affects practice as we know it thus far, in which way would what you do be specifically different?
We do everything kind of differently.

As part of a comprehensive approach?
Yes. Concrete, glass, steel pretty much had its century or two. Organic architects like Frank Lloyd Wright – I’ll just pick on the American [laughter] – he thought he was doing organic architecture, but it was really decorative. There are ideas about inside and outside, there were ideas about landscape. Certainly brilliant, part of the “American Sublime”. But it’s not organic. So, we want to use materials that are either grown in a lab, that are living in the first place or that are bits of nature without much modification whatsoever. As they are, tuned or tweaked for human programmatic use. So, whether it’s grafting woody plants into specific geometries, or working with complex maps out of e-coli, or projects that we’re doing with mycelium or fungus … we are working with crickets as a form of protein consumption. We’re always using some kind of living organism and rethinking the actual material. Biomaterials is the term. It’s not biomimicry. If anyone says I’m a biomimicrist …

You’ll get angry!
I’ll get angry. [laughter] I mean, biomimicry is OK, it’s good, it’s better than not doing biomimicry. But we’re not here to copy nature. It’s not mimesis. We’re using actual nature in order to learn from and with it. We’re doing a project that is about co-building with bees. So, bees are integrated in the construction process. It’s fascinating, because no computer can do that. I have a PhD in computation, and I can tell you, they don’t do that.

And you ought to know!
I would think so. [laughter] But then again, maybe the kids are smarter these days.

That’s fair enough.
And that is what made Gehry special. Computation would do one thing, but then he would mess it up with his hands. The hand is one of the greatest instruments for computation imaginable.

As seen in the Simpsons episode! [laughter]
That’s actually one of his, Frank’s, only things he has in his office. A hockey jersey of the Toronto Maple Leafs that has his name on it and a Simpsons image of him as a Simpsons character. All his other awards don’t mean as much to him.

And that is something one can be really be proud of! Thinking about what you said, it seems to me what you’re aiming at is a non-mortality oriented architecture?
That’s good, non-mortality oriented …

A non-deadly architecture?
It’s been coined here!

I tend to be a sloganizer, that’s kind of my secret superpower.
You’re good! [laughter]

Thank you very much, it’s much appreciated! I’m also getting an idea of how you might understand resilience. How do you understand it, and what do you think are the greatest inhibitors to achieving resilience?
Resilience in regenerative, also socio-ecological design thinking are very similar camps and they’re all extremely good. The challenge is a capricious public, especially in the United States. They’re not sure, they don’t understand it fully, the economics behind it haven’t been worked out long enough as to make a true commitment or turn in order to change the game. Neither is political leadership on board. If you want to get policy in place for some of these things, they want to have more science, more case studies, more examples before they’re going to vote for something that no one else is supporting. So, it’s the human factor. This silo mentality is the biggest inhibitor. Not the engineering, not the science, not the authorship of the design. Those communities are really hellbent on doing something. And more of such projects are being realized. Not fast enough and certainly not enough of it, anywhere, but we have to go there. Also, before you get to resilience in design, you may want to consider whether we should build anything at all – reduction in the first place is probably an even better principle. This is more standard to what happens in Europe than what happens in the United States. It’s so easy to build on virgin green land in the US. The idea that you do adaptive reuse is problematic, its just more expensive. And it’s really hard to convince a client to use a product like bamboo flooring if it’s three times the cost. They don’t have a hundred years of research compared to oak or some kind of stone where they know if they spill something on it or if they use a wax or some kind of cleaning material, it’s not going to damage the flooring or they even have to replace their floor. They want to stick with the things that have been in use in the building trades for a long time. And that, in itself, represents a certain form of resilience, but the amount of carbon required to create any of those materials is unacceptable.

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“It’s up to design to offer products or a kind of a system change that people can choose to be a part of.”

So, essentially, one factor is people, the other is politics?
Yes. That might be obvious bromide, but it’s a bromide that’s not easy to change. We’re also not used to changing behaviors. Some of this is really hard to do. I think it’s up to design to offer products or a kind of a system change that people can choose to be a part of.

Where does the inspiration come from for these approaches?
There was this exciting moment under Kennedy, the NASA program, which is a part of our typeface, where the United States said, let’s do something amazing – for the entire world. We went from Kitty Hawk, the first flights, in what, fifty years? to the Apollo missions. So, that’s embedded in our typeface. Not so much in terms of “let’s return to that nostalgia”, but a general “oh my gosh! let’s be visionary, let’s change the game and let’s do it” mentality.

How does this mindset inform you projects?
Through optimism. In that time period, also, coming from the 70s, when I was born, that culture I grew up in, it was just amazing. That’s when Science Fiction exploded …

Star Wars …
Star Wars is amazing. It’s becoming a myth equivalent to something like the Bible.

“Without these fictional narratives, we wouldn’t have the architecture that we have today.”

Yeah, which is scary!
Which is scary … [laughter] Without these fictional narratives, we wouldn’t have the architecture that we have today. We wouldn’t have iPhones. We wouldn’t have the world that we live in. It’s the scenarios that people comprehend, together, universally, like Mr. Spock’s tricorder. It’s amazing! As a kid, I never thought I’d have all the bits of information in this tool, talk to a ship in outer space or anybody on the planet while looking at plants and be able to find out what type of species they are. It’s basically Google, it’s everything in one. And that’s what an iPhone is, what these handheld technologies are. And we’ve accepted that. At first we thought it would be impossible, but this super-popular narrative in Science Fiction got us there. If you’re not inspired by Science Fiction, then you shouldn’t be in design.

That’s very inspiring, I would wholeheartedly agree with that!
Science Fiction is so powerful in architecture. And, of course, it also comes from the culture of architecture. A lot of people I graduated with went off to work on movies like Batman and Judge Dredd and make all the city scenes in Star Trek and Star Wars. It’s delivered by film, yet sculpted by architects.

In my view there is a disconnect between the futuristic potential on the one hand and the aesthetics of some products on the other – meaning that the final product can still have aesthetics that don’t immediately connect to being overtly futuristic.
So it won’t look like metropolis?

So it doesn’t look like metropolis, and instead, it’ll look like a typical Cape Cod house or whatever.
That’s actually a really good point. Having a classical Cape Cod house or an English Tudor or Spanish Colonial and the entire inside is a web of smart infrastructure, that’s where we’re headed. All the major corporations are doing that. Amazon is already in our homes, Google is in our homes, we use smart metering and thermostat systems to anything that controls TV and stereo systems. Technology such as engineered lumber is becoming super-sophisticated. So, it looks like the same stick-build from the 50s, but is actually a lot smarter and certainly heavily engineered. It could be pre-assembled, etc. So, it’s getting a lot better. The reason for the aesthetics that you point out is that banks loan money for houses that sell. And houses that sell look like what mom’s and dad’s house and grandpa’s house looked like. That still sticks. It’s always harder to sell a modern-looking house than something more traditional. I don’t know when that’s going to change, but that’s probably a 50 or 100 year shift. It doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing or a good thing.

It’s just seems that’s the way it is. Buildings and architecture are perceived by and recognized by the consumer, so if the consumer has a problem recognizing the product, the person who produces it has a problem, too. In terms of cars, I recall this one case where the former head designer of BMW, Chris Bangle, designed the new 7 model, and there was an uproar because that wasn’t what buyers considered a BMW 7 to be. The company redesigned it in ways that were more familiar to the customer.
And that’s a car, too. [laughter] So, I was actually in the car group at MIT, and we did a lot of design research.

Ah, ok!
We had cars designed that were soft and made out of materials that were incredibly lightweight, that were skinned over parametrically controlled ribs and other systems. And we tested how they responded aerodynamically. These cars were aerodynamic in more than one direction. When turning the wind force doesn’t have the same effect as it does over a stiff body. So we looked at vehicles that could change dynamics. The F1 racers did that with fins and other carefully calibrated parts. We researched suitable materials such as super thin carbon fibre. But there is brand messaging too, and BMW obviously has that. You don’t really have that with houses, unless you’re a starchitect. You make a BMW look like something you’ve never seen before … and actually, I love BMWs, the i8 is amazing.

“I’m sorry, but Rem Koolhaas didn’t do all those things by himself.”

Speaking of starchitects, it seems we’re moving in the exact opposite direction. Are they slowly fading away?
Yes. So, a really good friend, Bjarke Ingels, I’ve known him since before he was Bjarke Ingels … [laughter] He’s a sweetheart, he’s great. I think he’s going to be the last of his kind. I think working in teams that are more anonymous, that recognize that collaboration in teams gets projects done, is the future. I’m sorry, but Rem Koolhaas didn’t do all those things by himself.

He didn’t have to!
He didn’t have to. I think architects want to move, shift, work in ways which aren’t necessarily corporate, but in small, tight groups that have names that don’t necessarily celebrate one or two figureheads. It’s an ongoing trend. I support it completely. It’s something I can’t predict entirely, but I don’t see a great future in starchitecture. The term itself is derogatory. But people still want that messaging. Heatherwick gets building commissions, so people can say, “I have a Heatherwick.” So, the more these developers need it, that will be what they’re doing. They also pay a premium price for that.

“I don’t need to design for the super-wealthy to make the world a better place.”

Since you’re also teaching, what would your advice be to students?
Architecture is the best field on the planet and deploys the most powerful thing we have, which is the imagination. The most powerful tool humans have is our creative power, our imagination. Architecture is probably the best profession, probably art as well, but more so architecture, where you can learn to rationally move through a process and get things executed on a totally different scale. Meet your own messaging and your own kind of idiosyncratic selfish ideas, fine. But also make the world a better place and have a dialog which will last for centuries. Confront the work of people who worked a hundred years ago and do work that projects 100 years into the future. I think students can allow themselves to be inventors. I don’t’ think we really recognize that design is a form of invention. The designer-as-inventor-category, that’s where I fit in, a lot of my colleagues fit in. When you look at real-world problems and you work very hard to come up with solutions that are only limited by the power of the information you have access to and your own understanding of your imagination. Developing something that could work for almost no money and changes the game. When you design for the other 99 percent. I love that. I don’t need to design for the super-wealthy to make the world a better place. By using the power of invention and do products like the Life Straw or the Hippo Roller for women who carry water 8 miles every day, a barrel with a push stick, that comes out of the realm of design.

From what I’m seeing there is a lot more sensitivity with regards to issues of socially responsible design. Instead of people coming in and saying, “this is what we’re going to do”, employing a model where we say, “let’s ask the people who are involved.” Because in that case a product becomes more sustainable, where everybody can agree it is something that benefits those involved, and is not imposed from the outside or above.
At NYU, where I’m teaching, Decolonization is huge. Basically everything we have been teaching students thus far is “white men with beards”. From Socrates to Shakespeare to Foucault.

Also, when trying to listen to the voices that have something to say, sometimes they’re not the loudest voices.
That is totally true. I absolutely agree. We do have a “West is best” mentality. We have to, as much as possible, decolonize that and think about what is possible in a different context. I like doing the work I do, I like keeping it in New York, because I know New York. It’s a global city. It also depends on how woke you are. I don’t know if you have that term in German …

Yes we do! We have a different word for it though. [laughter]
Wohk.

Both: WOHK! [laughter]

Excellent! Thank you very much!
It’s good to be here.

_

Mitchell Joachim, Maria Aiolova and Terreform ONE recently published “Design with Life”. The book presents essays and projects featuring new approaches in socio-ecological design thinking that intersect with architecture, urban systems and synthetic biology. “Design with Life” includes numerous contributions by guest authors.

Mitchell Joachim, Maria Aiolova, Terreform ONE (2020): Design with Life. Biotech Architecture and Resilient Cities. Actar Publishers (420 pages).

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.

In the urban heart of Jinhua, a city with a population of over one million, one last piece of natural riparian wetland of more than 64 acres remains undeveloped. Located where the Wuyi River and Yiwu River converge to form Jinhua River, this wetland is called Yanweizhou, meaning “the sparrow tail”. The three rivers divide the densely populated communities in the region. As a result of this inaccessibility, the cultural facilities, including the opera house and the green spaces adjacent to the Yanweizhou, were underutilized. Most of the riparian wetland has been fragmented or destroyed by sand quarries and is now covered with secondary growth.

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Due to its monsoon climate, Jinhua suffers from annual flooding. Hard high walls have been built, or were planned to be built, to protect the last patch of riparian wetland (Yanweizhou) from the 20-year and 200-year floods. These floodwalls would create dry parkland above the water, but destroy the lush and dynamic wetland ecosystem. Therefore, we devised a contrasting solution and convinced the city authorities to stop the construction of the concrete floodwall as well as demolish others. Instead, the Yanweizhou Park project “makes friends” with flooding by using a cut-and-fill strategy to balance earthwork and by creating a water-resilient, terraced river embankment that is covered with flood-adapted native vegetation. Floodable pedestrian paths and pavilions are integrated with the planting terraces, which will be closed to the public during the short period of flooding. The floods bring fertile silt that is deposited over the terraces and enriches the growing condition for the tall grasses that are native to the riparian habitat. The terraced embankment will also remediate and filtrate the stormwater from the pavement above. The Yanweizhou Park project showcases a replicable and resilient ecological solution to large-scale flood management.

In addition to the terraced river embankment, the inland area is entirely permeable in order to create a water-resilient landscape through the extensive use of gravel that is re-used material from the site. The gravel is used for the pedestrian areas; the circular bio-swales are integrated with tree planters; and permeable concrete pavement is used for vehicular access routes and parking lots. The inner pond on the inland is designed to encourage river water to infiltrate through gravel layers. This mechanically and biologically improves the water quality to make the water swimmable.

A pedestrian bridge snakes across the rivers, linking the parks along the riverbanks in both the southern and northern city districts, and connecting the city with Yanweizhou Park within the river. The bridge design was inspired by the local tradition of dragon dancing during the Spring Festival. For this celebration, many families bind their wooden benches together to create a long and colorful dragon that winds through the fields and along narrow dirt paths. The Bench Dragon is flexible in length and form as people join or leave the celebration. Like the Bench Dragon during the annual festival, the Bench Dragon Bridge symbolizes not only a form of celebration practiced in the Jinhua area, but is a bond that strengthens a cultural and social identity unique to this region. As water-resilient infrastructure, the new bridge is elevated above the 200-year flood level, while the ramps connecting the riparian wetland park can be submerged during the 20-year and larger floods. The bridge also hovers above the preserved patch of riparian wetland and allows visitors an intimate connection to nature. The many ramps to the bridge create flexible and easy access for residents from various locations of the city in adaptation to the flow of people. Reaching a total length of 2.300 feet, the bridge is composed of a steel structure with fiberglass handrails and bamboo paving. It is truly a resilient bridge that is adaptive to river currents and the flows of people, while binding city and nature, future and past. […]

After the park opened in May 2014, an average of 40.000 visitors used the park and the bridge each day. It was recently awarded the World Landscape of the Year 2015.

Read the full article in Topos 90 – Resilient Cities and Landscapes.