Dispatches -- Is New Orleans a Shrinking City

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Dispatch Is New Orleans a Shrinking City? Laura Wolf-Powers Across the globe over the last century, rural-to-urban migration and advances in transportation and construction technology have had a staggering impact on the morphology of urban places and their relation to their hinterlands. But while a greater proportion of the Earth’s population today lives in cities than ever before, some cities are contracting. According to the German Federal Cultural Foundation’s Shrinking Cities Project (www.shrinkingcities. com), 370 cities with populations of 100,000 or more have undergone population losses of greater than 10 percent in the last ﬁve decades. Occa- sionally, population loss has been tem- porary, but usually it has endured. In a political economy ﬁxated on constant growth, this has presented vexing challenges for those who remain. Should population loss prompt territorial retrenchment—an actual cinching in of a city’s boundaries? Do losses of population and proﬁt-making activity call for massive interven- tions in social planning and landscape design? Or can incremental responses at the level of the lot, the household, and the neighborhood sometimes soothe the topographic, economic and psychic effects of decline more skill- fully? Might decline be an opportu- nity for innovation and renewal? Planned Shrinkage? Many of these questions are addressed in the German Federal Cultural Foundation’s Shrinking Cities exhibition, which appeared at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery and the Van Alen Institute in New York City from December 7, 2006, to Febru- ary 2, 2007. This important traveling show also provided the backdrop for a January 29 symposium at Pratt titled “Is New Orleans a Shrinking City?” At the symposium, two presentations and a panel discussion applied ques- tions raised by the exhibition to New Orleans, a city whose current popu- lation, estimated at 230,000, is half what it was before Hurricane Katrina forced its evacuation in late August and early September 2005. Startling images of entire neigh- borhoods under water after the storm, along with predictions by geologists of both climate change-induced sea- level change and continued local land subsidence (New Orleans is also a “sinking city,” currently subsiding by two inches per decade), have caused many to wonder whether deliberate shrinkage might not be a wise policy there. Calls to limit rebuilding to high ground and let certain heavily ﬂooded parts of the city devolve into parks and nature preserves were ﬁrst heard in the storm’s immediate after- math. They were echoed in recom- mendations issued by the Urban Land Institute and the Bring New Orleans Back Commission in January 2006. As symposium participants pointed out, however, even if planned shrink- age may seem to make sense to tech- nicians examining the city from the air, the realities on the ground are considerably more complex. First, while portions of the most storm- damaged territory may lie three feet or more below sea level, their sup- posed unsuitability for redevelopment is only a matter of degree. The entire city of New Orleans is like a bowl, requiring elaborately engineered pumping stations, levees and canals to keep it dry. Furthermore, according to pan- elist James Dart of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, a New Orleans native, “If the eye of Hur- ricane Katrina had moved toward the northwest instead of the northeast, the biggest ﬂooding impact would have been in low-elevation areas like Algiers and the west-bank suburbs. If the devastation had concentrated in afﬂuent areas, it seems unlikely that anyone would be talking about not rebuilding.” Meanwhile, as decision-making about recovery proceeded at a molas- ses-like pace, people simply returned, took stock, and began reconstructing their homes, defying assumptions that damaged communities would remain diasporic. “Model Blocks” in Plum Orchard The ﬁrst presentation at the January symposium concentrated on work at Pratt Institute and NJIT under a grant from the U.S. Depart- ment of Housing and Urban Devel- opment. Through the grant, part of the Universities Revitalizing America Partnerships program, architects and planners at the two schools have been working with ACORN Housing Corporation to help people in a twelve-block area of New Orleans East retroﬁt their houses and adapt their properties. The architecture in this area, which is part of the Plum Orchard neighborhood, is diverse, ranging from traditional New Orleans “shotgun” houses to more suburban “slab-on-grade” models built during the eastward migration of many New Orleanians in the 1950s and 60s. While New Orleans East as a whole has only 30 percent of its pre- Katrina population, people have resettled Plum Orchard somewhat more densely. In the process, they have often received support from tight-knit familial and social networks whose graphic expression on GIS maps tells a different story from maps that suggest the neighborhood is doomed to abandonment At the symposium, Pratt architect Deborah Gans showed student and Places 19.1