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

An empty lot on high ground.
View of the freeway infrastructure from the river.
dry surface that could accommodate a large percentage of the
programmes and uses that today are on the most liable areas.
Given today’s situation, the primary task is to conceptualise
an urban framework that is informed by the city’s most
intense pressure systems: physical, social, economic and
environmental factors can define a working diagram for the
reconfiguration of the obsolete infrastructural networks
altered by the turbulent nature of the storm – one that can
hint towards a process that goes beyond the casual patching of
broken levees, and easily explores multiple relationships
among the diverse oscillating figures currently at play in the
city. In turn, this will provide an exploratory point of
departure that allows for the possibility of coalition and
contestation, and supply a reference point for the unfolding of
a new construct of ground.
The possible sources for a tentative framework are infinite,
and can come from a multitude of contradicting backgrounds.
It is perhaps the city’s time-honoured idea of using the section
as an active mechanism that can drive the development of a
well-attuned reconstruction process. New Orleans, the
amalgamation of assorted constructs of ground, has resulted
in a metropolis with a hyperartificial terrain condition where
discrete stratifications have coalesced into a highly operative
consolidated entity. It is perhaps in the recognition of this
thick sectional field as something much more animate and
operative than a mere historical palimpsest, that the greatest
potential of reconstruction lies. It is through inventive
representations and interpretations of this dynamic domain
that we will be able to rethink relationships between the city
and the much broader fluid environment that partially owns
it, and finally conceive strategies that move beyond the
sectionally mute development practices that have driven the
urbanisation of New Orleans for the last 50 years. 4
The preliminary research from which this essay is generated was conducted
by Joan Busquets and Felipe Correa at the Harvard University Graduate
School of Design during the 2004–05 academic year.
Diagram showing the city’s urban imprint before and after Hurricane Katrina.
Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Felipe Correa
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