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Richard Campanella on Delta Urbanism and New Orleans
In a couple great articles about Delta Urbanism and New Orleans, published on Design Observer, Tulane geographer Richard Campanella sounds a warning about “plandemonium” and describes the “difficult choices” made in the aftermath of Katrina:
In most cases, momentum from the past is good for landscapes and cityscapes. It creates value, generates wealth, and makes places distinctive and interesting. Witness New Orleans’s colorful street names, pedestrian-scale neighborhoods and vast inventory of historical structures. But occasionally that momentum leads a community down a troubled path, in this case toward geological and environmental unsustainability.
The footprint controversy represented a genuine dilemma, with sound arguments and unpleasant consequences on either side. Dilemmas demand decisions — difficult choices — or else they persist and usually worsen. New Orleans’s great footprint debate concluded when officials and society at large decided not to make the difficult choice of urban shrinkage. By 2009, four years after the flood, a population of at most 350,000 occupied a cityscape designed for well over 600,000.
The aftermath of this catastrophe, as often happens, may become the prelude to the next.
Read the full articles here:
