City in SuspensionNew Orleans and the Construction of Ground

Underfoot,obscured fromview, ground is

the mostfundamental

material ofconstruction and the

urban landscape. As NewOrleans has proved, we

forget it at our peril. Shapedby the mound, the levee andmost recently the pump, the

ground of the Crescent City wasneglected and overlooked even inareas of new development. Felipe

Correa describes how, in theaftermath of Hurricane Katrina,

the thorough re-evaluationof the city’s ground is a

prerequisite to urbanreorganisation.

Underfoot,obscured fromview, ground is

the mostfundamental

material ofconstruction and the

urban landscape. As NewOrleans has proved, we

forget it at our peril. Shapedby the mound, the levee andmost recently the pump, the

ground of the Crescent City wasneglected and overlooked even inareas of new development. Felipe

Correa describes how, in theaftermath of Hurricane Katrina,

the thorough re-evaluationof the city’s ground is a

prerequisite to urbanreorganisation.

99

A sectional cut through New Orleans easily distinguishes all ofthe different fragments and membranes that in summationconstruct the city’s ground, and freshly reveals an intrinsicdesire for parchedness. At its deepest level, the city contains anetwork of tubes and conduits that partially appropriate the oldcanal infrastructure. These are powered by 22 pump stations,which are continuously pumping excess water from the cityover the levee and into the river and lake, keeping the city’swater table artificially low. Above the drainage and sewerageinfrastructure sits the city’s primary road network. Capitalisingon the old existing ridges – the Esplanade Ridge, Gentilly Ridgeand Metarie Ridge in particular – the primary navigationalsystem remains fairly constant in elevation, oscillating between1.2 and 1.8 metres (4 to 6 feet) above sea level and establishingan extreme sectional difference with the lowest areas in the cityof approximately 2.1 to 2.7 metres (7 to 9 feet).

Containment infrastructure follows. Composed primarily oflevees and flood walls, this groundwork flanks the river andlake, rising twice as high as any natural formation. On thelake side, the levees crest at a height of approximately 1.8metres (6 feet) above sea level. On the riverfront, the leveealong with elevated platforms and the flood wall can go up to6.7 metres (22 feet), creating a generous distance from theriver current that flows above the level of the city but belowthe top of the dyke. High above the perceived ground, asystem of freeways and elevated roads seems to be floating,delicately anchored by slim pylons that register the highestlayer of infrastructure hovering at approximately 9 metres (30feet) above sea level. On average, 12 metres (40 feet) is thesectional difference of the multiple forms of infrastructurethat make up the ground of New Orleans, a city that at firstsight appears as flat as a Midwestern plain.

New Orleans can be conceptualised as a thickinfrastructural field – one that has resulted from theamalgamation of discrete material fragments, the outcome ofnumerous constructs of ground that have been materialised

and deployed in the city throughout its history. Theseconstructs, all different in scope, ambition and action, shareone common aspiration: to form a ground independent fromwater, in a territory with an intrinsic desire to return to aliminal state that is neither water nor land, but an overmoistsludge where a city has been circumspectly placed insuspension. Primarily grounded by construction techniquesfavoured in soft lands, the city, which at first might beperceived as firm ground that keeps a distance from the riverand lake, is actually an infrastructural Î le Flotant in anunremitting state of unrest.

This ground, which has been in a constant formativeprocess throughout centuries of settlement, has transmutedslowly from natural flood plain to an artificial system ofconduits, allowing for a transition from a sectionalunderstanding of ground into a horizontal mode of occupyingit. The mound, the canal, the levee and, most recently, themechanical pump have been the key shapers of ground in theCrescent City, moulding an imprint defined by the ubiquitousgeometries of each.

Mounds: Nomadic TopographiesInitial settlers in the area subsisted mostly from fishing.Their specific patterns of inhabitation required a directrelationship with the fluctuations of the flood plain,resulting in nomadic settlements along the edges wherefishing was most productive. Perhaps the most significantevidence of initial forms of ground construction can be seenthrough archaeological episodes. Mounds, found in the areabetween the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, wereconstructed from leftover shells and debris. The specificconstruction of these mounds still remains unclear, but thegeneral attitude towards their immediate environment isevident – the need to manipulate the ground conditionthrough vertical build-up in order to achieve a greatersectional difference with the wavering water levels. From

The relayered Lower Mississippi River Basin.

Delaminations of water catchment, flood plain and settlement in the Lower Mississippi River Basin.

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the start, settlers had to construct a unit of measure,qualitative and subjective at first, that would allow them toestablish a relationship between the different entities inoscillation. This vertical build-up, which shifted in relationto the fishing cycles, was a first attempt to establish adifferentiation between natural processes and the firstimprints of human settlement.

Canals: Striated TopographiesUpon the arrival of Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and his brotherJean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville in the early 18th century,a new ideology about the way this territory could be handledbegan a slow, but steady, process of transformation. For theFrench, the biggest challenge in taming this territory entailedpreparing ground suitable for agricultural production and,more importantly, finding a way to introduce the plantationmodel into this land. With this purpose, it was essential todevelop surveying techniques and a parcel structure thatwould alter the swamp into the agricultural gold mine theFrench had envisioned. If initial settlers in the area had

established a vertical condition that allowed them tosectionally distance themselves from the flood plain, the newmodel aimed for a striation of the territory and lines thatwould serve as both geopolitical demarcations and drainageinfrastructure. This provided a new horizontal skeleton thatwould induce an agile figure for the terrain, one betterattuned to the new economy of lower Louisiana and one thatprovided confidence for the settlement of future outposts.

Levees: Contained TopographiesThrough the development of the agricultural carpet, landstripped of original cane and vegetation became weaker andmore prone to spillages and crevasses. The never inertstrength of the water became an even more muscularantagonist in the relentless process of forming ground, at apoint in time where the already permanent agriculturalsettlements were much too prosperous to simply pick up andgo. The dilapidated state of the existing levees – sporadic andill-constructed walls of soil and sand – put in place byindividual landowners, combined with a need to further

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extend the agricultural carpet towards lower marshes,catalysed another very precise construct of ground: one thatsuperseded the striated configuration of drainage canals withthe construction of massive levees that would systematicallytransform the flood plain into a single conduit, and containmost, if not all, of the water away from the claimed tract ofland between the river and the lake.

This newly contained landscape allowed for an intriguingprocess of urban fragmentation that was carefully layeredover the 17th-century agricultural silhouette. The originalplantation lines that for approximately a century served asdrainage canals were systematically covered and transformedinto navigational conduits that made up a maxi-grid thatwould carefully frame the urban block and parcel structureto come. A constant square block, similar in dimension, butnot in grain, to that of the French Quarter, wassystematically traced throughout the entire river bend,creating a new ground condition that negotiated between theidiosyncrasies of the tangential plantation lines and theregulatory rigour of the top-down grid.

Pumps: Mechanical TopographiesAs New Orleans constantly transformed from an agriculturalfield into an urbanised mesh, the massive levees constructedalong the river throughout the 18th century had shifted thenatural water levels of the flood plain and forced them to rise.The city was pressured to build another set of levees flankingLake Pontchartrain to prevent high lake tides from backinginto the lower quarters of the city through the existing canals.This resulted in two artificial higher edges that allowed for adry concave surface to be fully urbanised. Granted that thisnew infrastructure had proffered a much more secure groundfor urban development, it also blocked all possibilities ofremoving rain-water overflow through existing canals. Thenew lake and river edges were too high for run-off to flownaturally into either body of water.

Local engineers worked for many years to conceive amechanical system that would effectively drain wateragainst gravity. The challenge was extreme. As the city’stopography decreases as it moves away from the river, thestrength of the pumping mechanism had to be gargantuan

The fracturing process of agricultural fields as they transform into urban parcels.

Plantation lines defining the urban–agriculturalmorphology of the Lower Mississippi basin.

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in order for water to pour into the river, over the levees. Thedevice invented by local engineer AB Wood in the early1900s transformed New Orleans into a new mechanicallychoreographed ground, where dryness was the result of asimple mathematical equation.

If indeed this highly mechanical system had provided acontrolled environment that was unprecedented in the historyof New Orleans, perhaps future development took theseimplementations too much for granted. A thinly woven carpetwith a generic suburban pattern colonised the lowest areas inthe city. New development paid no attention to the highlydelicate condition of ground and ignored all the axioms thateffectively shaped the initial swathes along the riverfront.Topography was neglected even at the scale of individualbuildings, where the raised first floor of the shotgun househad been substituted for sectionally mute ranch-style homes. Atechnologically overconfident city ignored the time-honouredsectional condition and its agency in shaping this terrain.

Speculations on a New Construct of GroundA look at Hurricane Katrina through a more ample historicallens frames this recent devastating event less as an isolatedtragedy and more as the result of a cyclical conditioninherent to New Orleans. The threat of the storm and itsoccurrence has been ubiquitous to the city and a significantshaper of its distinct forms of urbanism. Hurricane Betsy inthe 1960s, the floods of 1884 and 1927, among others, havebeen critical moments in the city’s history, and substantialviews about how to engage this land have repeatedlyemerged from such tragic events. The devastation brought byKatrina in August 2005 has raised a wide array of operativeissues that must be tackled through the re-evaluation of thecity’s ground and the conception of new organisationalcoalitions that could better respond to New Orleans’ currenturban problematic and, at the same time, establish a revisedattitude towards its unsubstantial soil and the infrastructurerequired to make it ground.

Throughout the 20th century, New Orleans has focused onsecuring a fixed and dry urban imprint through the use ofextreme mechanisms. Until today, a relatively dry concavesurface, the exact opposite of the original mound, had beenartificially constructed through a well-choreographed systemof levees, spillways and pumps. Katrina’s magnitudeobliterated the secured urban imprint guaranteed by thegargantuan infrastructural initiatives of the last 200 years,and the city transmuted from established settlement to a newfrontier zone that must be reinterpreted and repossessed.

The city’s quotidian infrastructural practices must beprovisionally suspended to allow for the emergence of a newconstruct of ground. For one thing, the golden age of publicworks in the city has reached its built-in expiration date. Theforms of containment still operative in the city were conceived

The amalgamation of infrastructure that makes up New Orleans’ current ground.

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for an era in which infrastructure was the backbone ofdevelopment. Levees, drainage canals and pump stations thattraditionally safeguarded the city’s ground have been neglectedfor many decades, and the moment is ripe for devising newways of negotiating differences between wet and dry.

The water’s erasure of a large percentage of the urbancarpet also hints at the potential of redefining the city’s urbanimprint and establishing diverse mechanisms to contract itsthin, but overextended, dimensions. In the last 40 years, NewOrleans has been subject to a massive decline in population.Not unlike many other American cities, many dwellers havemigrated to adjacent suburbs bringing down the numbersfrom 630,000 inhabitants in the 1960s to approximately480,000 today. This decrease in population can be directlycontrasted to a considerable stretch in the urban carpet into

the lowest areas in the city. New Orleans’ surface has grownfrom 260 square kilometres (100 square miles) in the 1960s to466 square kilometres (180 square miles) today, infilling thenewest areas in the city with thinned-out infrastructure, ill-dimensioned parcels and highly diluted grain.

In addition, port activities and warehouses that hadcolonised the highest swathe of land along the river edge havebeen subject to major shifts, freeing up a large percentage ofprime land. The already reduced port operations lean towardsmore compact and compartmentalised cargo mechanismsthat require less operating space and do not rely as much onadjacent storage areas. This has resulted in a long and fairlycontinuous tract of high land as well as a series of morediscrete parcels adjacent to it, which could conceivablybecome available for development and provide a significant

Current sectional analysis of New Orleans comparing topography to land use.

View of the city from the river.

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dry surface that could accommodate a large percentage of theprogrammes and uses that today are on the most liable areas.

Given today’s situation, the primary task is to conceptualisean urban framework that is informed by the city’s mostintense pressure systems: physical, social, economic andenvironmental factors can define a working diagram for thereconfiguration of the obsolete infrastructural networksaltered by the turbulent nature of the storm – one that canhint towards a process that goes beyond the casual patching ofbroken levees, and easily explores multiple relationshipsamong the diverse oscillating figures currently at play in thecity. In turn, this will provide an exploratory point ofdeparture that allows for the possibility of coalition andcontestation, and supply a reference point for the unfolding ofa new construct of ground.

The possible sources for a tentative framework are infinite,and can come from a multitude of contradicting backgrounds.It is perhaps the city’s time-honoured idea of using the sectionas an active mechanism that can drive the development of awell-attuned reconstruction process. New Orleans, theamalgamation of assorted constructs of ground, has resultedin a metropolis with a hyperartificial terrain condition wherediscrete stratifications have coalesced into a highly operativeconsolidated entity. It is perhaps in the recognition of thisthick sectional field as something much more animate andoperative than a mere historical palimpsest, that the greatestpotential of reconstruction lies. It is through inventiverepresentations and interpretations of this dynamic domainthat we will be able to rethink relationships between the cityand the much broader fluid environment that partially ownsit, and finally conceive strategies that move beyond thesectionally mute development practices that have driven theurbanisation of New Orleans for the last 50 years. 4

The preliminary research from which this essay is generated was conductedby Joan Busquets and Felipe Correa at the Harvard University GraduateSchool of Design during the 2004–05 academic year.

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Felipe Correa

An empty lot on high ground.

Diagram showing the city’s urban imprint before and after Hurricane Katrina.

View of the freeway infrastructure from the river.