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At LAM this month, we?re deep into Louisiana?with a jog over to the Mississippi Delta?as we get ready to head to New Orleans, where several thousand landscape architects and our friends will be gathered for ASLA?s Annual Meeting & EXPO from October 21 to 24. We?re looking at the state from many angles. So much progress has been made in New Orleans since 2005?s life-altering blow from Hurricane Katrina, it can be hard to get a clear picture as the city reconstitutes itself.
To lead things off, Elizabeth Mossop, ASLA, a practitioner and professor long based in New Orleans, captures the strategy for new water infrastructure, among other systems, in the city. The transformation in large-scale thinking alone is bracing, centered on recognizing water as the city?s greatest asset rather than its greatest threat. Another effort at structural change in New Orleans, the Future Ground competition, sought ways to deal with the expanses of vacant urban land, post-Katrina. Timothy Schuler, a LAM contributing editor, reports on the difficulty of reprogramming such a vastly changed environment and the disillusion of several design teams named finalists by the sponsors, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority and the Van Alen Institute. Farther south in Louisiana?s coastal zone, the residents of Isle de Jean Charles?considered to be among the first climate change refugees in the United States?are facing the simultaneous threats of sea-level rise and land loss. B...