Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

Current sectional analysis of New Orleans comparing topography to land use.
View of the city from the river.
for an era in which infrastructure was the backbone of
development. Levees, drainage canals and pump stations that
traditionally safeguarded the city’s ground have been neglected
for many decades, and the moment is ripe for devising new
ways of negotiating differences between wet and dry.
The water’s erasure of a large percentage of the urban
carpet also hints at the potential of redefining the city’s urban
imprint and establishing diverse mechanisms to contract its
thin, but overextended, dimensions. In the last 40 years, New
Orleans has been subject to a massive decline in population.
Not unlike many other American cities, many dwellers have
migrated to adjacent suburbs bringing down the numbers
from 630,000 inhabitants in the 1960s to approximately
480,000 today. This decrease in population can be directly
contrasted to a considerable stretch in the urban carpet into
the lowest areas in the city. New Orleans’ surface has grown
from 260 square kilometres (100 square miles) in the 1960s to
466 square kilometres (180 square miles) today, infilling the
newest areas in the city with thinned-out infrastructure, illdimensioned
parcels and highly diluted grain.
In addition, port activities and warehouses that had
colonised the highest swathe of land along the river edge have
been subject to major shifts, freeing up a large percentage of
prime land. The already reduced port operations lean towards
more compact and compartmentalised cargo mechanisms
that require less operating space and do not rely as much on
adjacent storage areas. This has resulted in a long and fairly
continuous tract of high land as well as a series of more
discrete parcels adjacent to it, which could conceivably
become available for development and provide a significant
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