What we’re trying to do is to get the whole area to think about water in a different way. When you’ve had a catastrophe like this, the normal tendency is never to want to see water again. That condemns you to a wrong way of thinking. There are ways to manage water – providing space for water to increase safety and to generate economic value – a lot of science and art can be employed to use water in the right way. It’s not exactly a cure, but a way of thinking holistically about water, which is practically never done in the US. We’re trying to introduce this concept to an environment that has been traumatised – to induce a discussion and develop a plan to live with the water.

 

There are things that should happen in the next five years, but if events go the way they’re going at the moment, we won’t be able to take advantage of the opportunities that the city has. We’re trying to get people to connect each element of infrastructure with its larger context and the landscape. For example, there are a series of outfall canals that drain into Lake Pontchartrain. The Corps [the US Army Corps of Engineers, a unit of the US military which is responsible for providing vital civil engineering and infrastructure works, as well as investigating, developing and maintaining water and related environmental resources] has built temporary protection at the end of each canal at the lakefront. These are the canals with low levees and I-walls on top of them that failed after Katrina. The storm surge is being kept out of the city now and the flood walls are being repaired, but there’s no agreement about a comprehensive solution. The Corps is not looking at this in a co-ordinated way. What we need is a set of dual purpose pumps at the lakefront, to keep out the storms and drain the interior. This would allow us to remove the I-walls and open the city in these locations to the waterways. We risk ending up with a wasteful series of actions that don’t take advantage of the opportunity to change the city to make it both safer and more attractive. We talk about the city being safer, but it has to be more attractive as well.

 

There have been very few negative reactions. There have been people who say “I don’t want any water in my neighbourhood – I’m just going to raise my house.” Usually these are people who are isolated and angry, who were flooded by the levee failures. People are looking for some way to reconstruct the city but the scale of the city is too big for the population we have now – and there is not enough funding for the reconstruction of the entire infrastructure. The City of New Orleans is populated with maybe 300,000 people and if you can’t afford an infrastructure for a city of 600,000, what do you do? There are difficult political decisions still to make. I believe we need to think of water as an entity, in its entirety, There’s not a rigid order water has to follow, it can be split according to conditions, it doesn’t have to go in straight lines, it can be implemented incrementally – but there still has to be some overall framework and system capacity. This framework has to fit with pre-existing conditions, including the base topographic layer and the settlement pattern. So, what we’re trying to do is find a strategy with potential for acceptance and the techniques to do it right.

 

If New Orleans succeeds, it will be making these moves and taking these incremental steps ad infinitum. You can look at it from bigger elements down to smaller elements and vice versa – every piece of property needs to account for water in a different way. In the Netherlands, the Dutch develop an area – called a polder – that has a perimeter and works as a unit for storm water management. This approach allows finite calculations – working out how much land is needed, how you hold that storm water so it doesn’t flood the system. We might develop polders; we might be able to create a canal system in certain sub basins in the city; but we will need to demonstrate how this would be of benefit. The history of New Orleans with regards to water is that for a hundred years the inhabitants have been pumping it away and hiding it from sight, so it’s a difficult reversal.

 

 

Absolutely. The lack of a leader, the lack of somebody who can see the way forward, see the way things have to be done and communicate the benefit of the changes we need is a hindrance. People are tired of planning processes that just go out and ask individuals and groups where they live and what they want. We have to be able to demonstrate to people that they are going to be better off with a new water infrastructure. We have to find a way, which I can’t find by myself, to compensate people if we expect them to relocate for public benefit. Everything has been incremental and market based, based on individuals making decisions, and as a result there has been far too little collective work and sense of shared purpose. There have been some neighbourhoods that have organised themselves to fight for their particular issues, but they sometimes lack a broader perspective. I think that is a real leadership issue. Everybody is afraid of the reactions of people who in fact have already been wronged; the politicians are afraid of the consequences of saying that change needs to occur.

 

But this time we have the support of the City Council. The concept of water in the city is not as frightening as the green blob was (in early post-Katrina plans, green dots were placed over whole neighbourhoods) because it doesn’t have to be a big lake; it can be a series of fingers, not a fist. It can be urban and much more subtle, and I think that is why people are interested. This is a huge challenge – to try to make people think about an element in a completely different way. The history of water in sub-tropical places is very different from that of Northern Europe, so we have to learn to operate whatever open water system we would create in a different way, using the best science and requiring engineers to be more than just nay-sayers. Engineers in the US can be quite negative about anything done differently from the way they’ve always done it. That is why the Dutch, who have so much positive experience dealing with water, are really helpful because they are not afraid of it at all.

 

We need to prioritise infrastructure that’s appropriate to the location – water infrastructure in New Orleans is different from what most of the US needs. The situation in Holland is more like what we’re trying to put in place. Of course we are working with an existing city so there can’t be a generic plan that gets applied everywhere – we can’t just say that we are going to build whatever there is in Town X, although of course we can use it for illustration purposes. We can’t say that we are going to impose Venice on New Orleans – although it may be an inspiration.

 

The problems we are dealing with are unique – New Orleans is not like most of the United States. It is a poor city, partly because Louisiana has had limited benefit from its own natural resources. But this lower, more attainable economic level is one of the reasons why New Orleans could be a fertile place for young people. It is beautiful and alluring enough for people to say that it would be worth it. It has an aura, a feeling. It’s a very difficult site – a good situation, as they say, but bad site. It’s an interesting place in a global sense.

 

The city’s geohydrology isn’t widely understood. Groundwater – and what you can do to limit subsidence in an urban area by managing it – has been fundamentally ignored, which has exacerbated the problems. In Rotterdam, they say they build on thick water, so I guess in deltas we just float everything. If you dry the land out then it shrinks. We can compare the situations in the two countries, if it is possible to do it in a non-political way. It is a problem in the current climate, in the US – that things have become political that shouldn’t be so.

 

There are certain places where some obvious major changes could be made, and those range from water infrastructure that can be redeveloped or exposed to a section of freeway in the centre of the city that is very destructive and should be removed. We advocate these changes, point out the benefits, and try to create consensus to make them happen. The difficulty is that if we don’t settle these things soon, changes will be put in place that cost lots of money and won’t do what we need done.

 

And where would the money come from? This is where the leadership – at every level – comes in. No one should expect a community that has been destroyed to be able to rebuild itself all on its own. New Orleans should have a primary say in what happens, but it’s going to need outside help. It’s not going to be able to do this on its own, or with command structures that follow orders despite the fact that the cost estimate, or whatever informed that order, wasn’t written correctly. We don’t have a consensus-based way of working, and with separate and often competing government entities, it’s difficult. The United States does not have a minister of water. We have a minister of transportation, for example, but someone to deal with water as a whole we don’t have.

 

I don’t know – we’ll see. I thought that there would be change but now we are in a situation of real financial difficulty so it’s going to be hard to develop the consensus that is needed. And if the economy deteriorates further, then what? Whether or not you try to revise governmental structure now or postpone it, New Orleans needs someone to look at it holistically and from the federal level, and say “Wait a minute – why are we going to spend this money to do that when we could spend the same amount of money and accomplish much more?” We need to reorient quickly to this because the Corps of Engineers has been given a deadline of 2011 to put its hurricane protection system in place, and they don’t have time to listen.

 

The Corps of Engineers is a military structure, so because orders are given they must follow them. We sometimes question whether those orders make sense. Architects are inclined to ask if we have the right problem defined – if a solution is really going to optimise results for the client over time. That discussion has not been had in New Orleans – a great example is the outfall canals. Because the Corps has put temporary flood protection in places which is probably good for ten years, we have time to reconsider the canals and the pumps that drain the city and really build something that will be of fundamental, long-term benefit to the city. But because the orders are given to put permanent pumps in place, they’re trying to do that despite the fact that the affected neighbourhoods don’t want the new pump station they may soon be getting. Also, without local leadership, it’s difficult to speak with a single voice, and planning processes are fairly unconnected. There are institutional problems in the city too because there are too many entities that have little pieces of the pie, so we know there is a lot of organisational work to be done, from top to bottom.

 

Combined, this isn’t giving us visionary infrastructure. One of the reasons I got involved in the whole situation is because in the planning process infrastructure has not been prioritised, much less water infrastructure and even less the sub-surface or foundational level. Nobody has focused on the soil or the groundwater and said “this is what we’re working with”.

 

It’s not a responsible way of doing things. It’s the appeal to the voter, the appeal to the constituent that drives the inquiry or proposition, but the result is not necessarily in the constituent’s informed interest. People are naturally concerned about their property but if you start with the level of the house, you can’t see the street, much less the block, much less the neighbourhood, or sub-basin, or the city. There needs to be some broader authority to organise this or there is no way the infrastructure can be investment grade, or be sustainable, or be able to pay back into the community, which is what it needs to do for safety and economic benefit. We need to put in place a platform that people can depend on and the economy can then run on.

 

There is hope that the new administration will pay attention to New Orleans in a comprehensive way, instead of just saying that the market has to fix it. The market will eat it but it won’t fix it! Who wants to be a delectable corpse?

 

One of the things we hope is that anybody running for Mayor of New Orleans later this year will engage the whole water issue. The point of talking about water is that at least it’s a comprehensive concept: water is an essential substance, an element that you fear or love, that you dream about – it’s an element of archetypal significance. When you fly into New Orleans you see water everywhere. Then you get off the plane and occasionally you’ll see a drainage canal. You can see a bayou in a couple of places and you can visit the river or visit the lake but you don’t get the sense that you’re living with water. People need to embrace it, but not by embracing their own death – we need to embrace it because there are masters who are managing it. A hundred years ago New Orleans had a state of the art drainage infrastructure but a hundred years is not a lifetime for a culture. I think by looking comprehensively at water we can re-invent ourselves and our city. We need to think about our microclimate but also engage an international knowledge base about the best practices for the water. The Netherlands is the leader – there is no other place where people deal so consistently and so confidently with water – so it’s an obvious choice to go to the people who know most.

 

Engineering is such a fallen discipline in the US – not all engineering of course – but we have lost a lot. I think that architects and engineers have a role to play in the future of New Orleans and the world with design informing politics rather than just being a victim of it or supplicant to it. So that is key to what we’re trying to do – to show that water infrastructure design can inform politics with new ideas that can benefit us all.

 

Contact:

David Waggonner
Email: david@wbarchitects.com
www.wbarchitects.com

 

J David Waggonner III