Four years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita led to devastating floods, the city of New Orleans still lacks a comprehensive plan for dealing with water, argues Derek Hoeferlin, a senior lecturer in the College and Graduate School of Architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Hoeferlin has led a series of Post-hurricane architecture and urban design studios, including most recently Gutter to Gulf, which explores spatial strategies for a potential water plan. Taught in tandem with faculty from the University of Toronto, the studio has won recognition from the American Collegiate Schools of Architecture and American Institute of Architects. Earlier this year Hoeferlin and Sam Fox School colleagues Ian Caine and Michael Heller tied for first place in the Rising Tides competition, which explored strategies for dealing with rising sea levels in the San Francisco Bay.

Hoeferlin, who outlined his views in commentary Aug. 30 for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is available for further discussion of planning and recovery in the New Orleans region. The full text of his commentary is provided below with permission of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

NEW ORLEANS NEEDS A WATER PLAN
by Derek Hoeferlin / Special to the Post-Dispatch

It's been four years since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and a tremendous amount of work remains to be done in New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast region. Yet the process of recovery and rebuilding has been mired in bureaucracy, inconsistency, endless red tape and failures at all levels of government. Indeed, the way forward is not much clearer today than it was four years ago.

New Orleans citizens are fatigued.

Ironically, in the wake of the flooding, the issue of water management has been conspicuously ignored, despite the fact that redevelopment is directly tied to ecology: it's the elephant in New Orleans' room. This oversight is mostly a result of the recovery planning itself coupled with a lack of clear leadership. Immediately after the hurricanes, the Mayor's Bring New Orleans Back commission naively recommended devoting large areas to green space. These "no-build" zones provoked tremendous public outcry. As a result, the subsequent Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP) — the only recovery plan formally adopted by the New Orleans and by the thereafter-formed Office of Recovery Management — skirted the issue of water management.

In other words, water and the space for it to flow and to be retained became a political hot potato.

However, as New Orleans moves from trauma and recovery to long-term rebuilding, many citizens are beginning to realize that we cannot simply "return everything back to the way she was pre-Katrina." Indeed, the old ways were deeply irresponsible — individually and collectively, privately and publicly — and will not work environmentally or economically in the 21st century.

As an alternate vision, New Orleans architect David Waggonner, with assistance from the Royal Netherlands Embassy and the American Planning Association, is spearheading an advocacy group known as Dutch Dialogues. Launched almost immediately after the hurricanes, Dutch Dialogues has brought together Dutch and American experts from several disciplines, including elected officials, to investigate how southern Louisiana, like the Netherlands, might adapt to the inherent threats of living in a subsiding delta.

Over the last four years Dutch Dialogues has been a lonely advocate for developing an integrated water management strategy. The good news is that their recommendations seem to be moving towards reality. In addition to support from the New Orleans Master Plan, members of the U.S. Congress and all levels of government have expressed strong interest in such an initiative. The trick, of course, will be implementation and finding from where the money flows.

In the broadest sense, water needs to become part of New Orleans' everyday context and consciousness: the roux to the city's gumbo. Relying solely on the Army Corps of Engineers to enact a "perimeter defense" of levees is not sustainable. Indeed, simply building bigger and bigger levees along the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain — "man-over-nature" engineering — actually has caused the city to dry up and sink, which in turn has crushed sub-surface drainage infrastructure.

Coupled with current forecasts for rising sea levels, this land sinking issue, known as subsidence, will only become exacerbated over the next 50 years, as coastal wetlands retreat towards New Orleans. To put it another way, instead keeping water out in order to maximize development — a model that in any case appears futile in our current economic climate — the city must develop a more nuanced balance between the built environment and what the delta really wants to be: a soggy, sediment-rich landscape.

Room for water, at multiple scales — from backyards to public rights-of-ways — must be laced into New Orleans' existing fabric and future construction techniques. This is not a matter of "no-build" zones or the forced removal of neighborhoods. In fact it is exactly the opposite: a method of integrating water, as both security and amenity, within unique and distinctive urban context. In so doing, perhaps we'll develop a new model for an environmentally, economically and socially sustainable 21st century city.

If we are lucky, this model — like jazz — will transfer to other American settings and beyond.

Derek Hoeferlin is a member of the Dutch Dialogues task force as well as an architect and senior lecturer in the College and Graduate School of Architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where he has led a series of Post-Katrina architecture and urban design studios. He is also founding principal of Derek James Hoeferlin Architect and a senior architect at H3 Studio, Inc., where from 2006-07 he served as project manager for the Unified New Orleans Plan.