Metropolis Mag: 20 ideas for New Orleans

Some Interesting Ones

13) Build a System of Community Aquaculture
Most New Orleanians, black or white, rich or poor, love seafood, and many of them make live-caught fish and shellfish part of their regular diet. They put down crab traps, crawfish traps, or slat traps for catfish or they fish, net shrimp, dig oysters or otherwise forage in the waters of bayou, river, lake, and marsh. Designing a network of managed nurseries for a variety of kinds of marine life, which can be harvested by ordinary people with ordinary tools, could make New Orleans a model for a sustainable city in a difficult place. Use the place, don’t fight it. The people of New Orleans always have.

11) Bring Back the Music (Part 2): Make a Place for the Musicians
Whether by setting aside a place or places in the city, or simply by offering New Orleans musicians priority in housing, facilitate their return and support them with the kind of practice spaces, gathering places, and other amenities that will make recovering New Orleans a nurturing space for musicians. Bring our musicians back and invite the world’s musicians to join them. They will come.

and who could leave out...

1) Reassemble and Restore Social Capital

full article.

Four Great Links from Things

Radical Cartography is a treasure trove of fascinating maps. Click on Projects and Yummy to get to the goodies. 'A Different Atlas,' 'Art & Language,' and the 'Boy Scout Camp' are a few of my favorites (don't forget to read the descriptions on the left.

Check out both galleries on Lori Nix's page. Her scenes of imminent destruction seem almost warm and comforting because they are easily dismissed as "models."

In Place of Berlin - scroll down for some good photography and observations about Berlin.

Reused Big Boxes. Yeah, there are a bunch of mega-churches, but there's also the Spam Museum.

Also (not from Things) Building Green's 10 point plan for New Orleans. Ambitious but informative proposal.

Comparison of American Urban Disasters in the 21st Century

Columnists are leaping on the similarities between the WTC and NOLA events. Convienient timing may be a partial cause of this bizzare comparison - but not the whole reason. People are pleading, begging that NOLA (and the many other communities devestated by Katrina) learn the lessons of New York's rebuilding process. Given the dissatisfaction surrounding the current plans for the former WTC site - perhaps these loud warnings are justified.

Rebuild New Orleans

The city needs two new features to ensure its continued existance.

First: The city needs to be hardened against another natural disaster of this scale. This is a massive task that goes far beyond rebuilding a few levies. Serious and unprecedented infrastructure improvements will be needed to rehabilitate the area.

Second: The city needs an economic base other than tourism. While the charming districts that have kept the city on life support largely survived the storm - they should not become the only reason to visit New Orleans in future decades. My magic wand: sustainable energy development.

Now that the nation has seen how fragile and expensive our energy habits are - we should honestly work to building large-scale solutions to oil dependence. The city can be reformatted - re imagined and eventually transformed into a model of energy independence. This would have to be in spite of the massive oil industry prescience to the south (drilling in the Gulf) and west (Houston) near New Orleans.

The benefit of rebuilding New Orleans this way is three fold. First, a cultural and historic American city would be saved for future generations. Second, the current residents who now face unemployment as a result of the hurricane would have opportunities in the reconstruction efforts. Third, the process of economic and physical transformation would draw in professionals and capital from the most cutting edge industries in the world. (After all, everybody wants a slice of the New Big Easy.)

The tough question is always how.

A few links:
A Daily Dose of Architecture
Wall Street Journal
New York Times Infographic
Slate - Don't Refloat
"The Control of Nature" - John McPhee, excerpt