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New Orleans is unlucky.  Since 2005’s low point, it has been victim to the worst exhibits of public stewardship and post-disaster response possible.  Beginning with foolishly-designed shipping canals/ levee-systems and unprepared disaster-response officials, missteps soon graduated to hopelessly inadequate provisions for temporary (and shoddily-built) emergency shelters, misappropriation-of-funds / self-dealing scandals, and a new crop of long-range planning initiatives that were tone-deaf to the underlying causes of the region’s pain.

Luckily, there are a number of good Samaritans in this country, earnestly hoping to do just a bit better.  So much so that the most creative (sustained) responses to problems relating to Hurricane Katrina are arguably due to charitable impulse and not public appropriation.  Projects run the gamut from clean-up assistance to legal aid to affordable/livable housing to pro-bono/student-led design tosmall-business development and more.

As significant as those contributions are, Dutch Dialogues may be the most important and certainly one of the most under-appreciated groups; instigated by Louisiana architect David Waggonner, the group of American and Dutch planning/engineering professionals is advocating for imperative changes to New Orleans’ troubled relationship with the natural forces of the Mississippi Delta, inspired by lessons learned from the Netherlands’ own experiences living below sea-level.

One of the group’s members, St. Louis architect Derek Hoeferlin, just wrote a spot-on critique about the ridiculously short-sighted creation of numerous “urban renewal” plans that ignore the New Orleans’ fundamental “location” problem.

Appropriately, Hoeferlin & Dutch Dialogues don’t call for the total abandonment of the city (even though there is substantial wisdom in such a realistically-impossible proposition); instead, the emphasis is on coexistence with the water beyond the levees.

Among other things, simply building larger and larger levees in a futile and expensive fight with nature is discouraged (though still part of the group’s vision); integrating renewed wet-land buffer zones with a more (strategically) permeable urban footprint is favored.  Low-lying neighborhoods would get parks and canals (think Venice) for increased storm-water storage; a super-levee would be built, wetlands would be restored, and islands would be constructed in area lakes to protect from storm surges; existing canals would be broadened and stripped of their impermeable concrete linings; etc.

Of course, Hoeferlin also points to the gaping problem with all this:  the plan has not been formally adopted by the relevant public entities, whose United New Orleans Plan is more intent on channeling pre-Katrina modes of living and less cognizant of the need for sustainable living situations.

Everyone knows that the enormity of any disaster (e.g., 9/11, the stock market crash in 1929, etc.) dictates the size of the post-disaster window of opportunity for visionary, necessary solutions.  As time passes by complacency sets in and it becomes increasingly more difficult to make tough (but necessary) choices designed to avoid another disaster.  Time after time, we end up with “solutions”that don’t cut to the core of the problem; here, we risk ending up with new parks and bigger levees, which will assuage our fears only until the next direct hit forces us to admit that our response to Katrina was utterly superficial.

Hopefully the window of opportunity for Dutch Dialogues’ vision is still open, four years after nature’s not-so-subtle reminder of its power.

Related Posts:  Make It Right designs unveiled in New Orleans; some miss memo, make it wrong &Rising Tides Competition winners announced, promptly forgotten

Also see Wired Magazine’s interest article Before the Levees Break: A Plan to Save the Netherlands

Image courtesy of everettt