Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Sean Fowler & Iñaki Alday
New Orleans is threatened by water: sea level rise, hurricanes, stormwater flooding, subsidence, a diminishing drinking water supply, saltwater intrusion, drought, and the escalation of all these challenges due to climate change. The New Orleans Public Space Project is a program of urban reform addressing these challenges, combining a multi-year research studio and research undertaken by the project directors. Starting from prior research by Sean Fowler, the studio proposes that public spaces in New Orleans, like local streets, can be redesigned as multi-functional, performant and distributed infrastructures to address drainage through nature-based solutions.1 This involves capturing, storing and infiltrating stormwater, treating it as a resource to be preserved rather than draining it to Lake Pontchartrain. These multi-functional and nature-based infrastructures can also address other challenges facing New Orleans, including equitable access to green spaces, urban heat islands, traffic, pollution and mobility. Therefore, this is not a project of stormwater management or “green infrastructures” but a comprehensive plan of urban reform, addressing long-standing, inequitable challenges facing the city developed over centuries. This paper reviews current progress on this project after the first two years, through both the research studio model and the connection to parallel research. This paper describes how this design research is a vital part of the project and the proposed urban reform. The first two years of the research studio analyzed and mapped the current and future challenges facing New Orleans through focuses on water, history, demographics, ecology and mobility to identify the areas facing greatest threat or impact, and of current and historic disinvestment. This urban analysis (or “diagnosis”) has been refined through a second year of the studio, building on the work of the first and leading to a projected future urban plan proposing multi-functional and nature-based solutions addressing multiple challenges in the most impacted areas. Finally, students developed individual case studies of these proposed infrastructures to demonstrate how they could be implemented across the city and the proposed impact on identified challenges. These current results of the New Orleans Public Space Project are discussed through the model of research studios and design research as an iterative and collaborative process within and between semesters, in tandem with interdisciplinary research supporting these core ideas.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.95
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
