More on Louisiana and Mississippi

Somehow I missed these panorama shots from the Washington Post of Hurricane Katrina damaged areas. Click here to see for yourself.

There has been a lot of grousing in the "industry" about those damn "new urbanists" and the hurculean and great and appreciated efforts in Mississippi, codified on the website Mississippi Renewal. In response to best practices in Mississippi, the state of Louisiana announced a similar initiative with the AIA, APA, and other groups. But AIA is listed as the lead group, and to my way of thinking, the difference between the AIA and the Congress for the New Urbanism is the difference between "building housing" and "building neighborhoods."

Note: the reason I call myself an "old urbanist" is because our cities already have these characteristics. Our challenge is to not let policies and practices diminish the competitive advantage that center cities possess in terms of urban design and walkable communities that are rich in transportation alternatives to the automobile.

Blair Kamin, the architectural writer for the Chicago Tribune, went to some of the charrettes in Mississippi, and he wrote about it on Sunday, in the article "Big plans, grand dreams in Mississippi." From the article:

BILOXI, Miss. -- Once you come here, once you see Hurricane Katrina's devastation first-hand and listen to the voices of the people who lived through it, the plans for rebuilding the Mississippi coastline that a team of sleep-deprived architects unveiled last week stand out as singularly impressive.

In scope and style, as well as speed, this was a "make no little plans" effort worthy of Chicago's Daniel Burnham: The simultaneous creation of plans for 11 towns along 80 miles of coastline in six days. The architects, who drank a lot of coffee and Red Bull, did more than produce a blueprint. They empowered people here with alternatives to placeless suburban sprawl.

No good deed goes unpunished, so the architects, who favor compact, walkable neighborhoods and are known as New Urbanists, immediately were trashed from afar by modernists who painted them as sentimental traditionalists. Eric Owen Moss, the director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, went so far as to say that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's decision to bring in the New Urbanists suggested a nostalgic yearning for the "good old days of the Old South."

Chicagoans familiar with the lasting power of Burnham's classically inspired civic parks and infrastructure -- and the way Mayor Richard M. Daley has used beautification to spark urban revival -- should recognize this argument for what it is: ideological cant.

The New Urbanists aren't the enemy. The enemy is a rebuilding process in which design isn't on the agenda at all. Barbour, who could have sat back and let the status quo ugly rise again, deserves credit for avoiding such a travesty. The citizenry is better off when it has more choices, not less.

In the wake of Katrina, the nitty-gritty matters of housing and community-building have replaced glamorous museums and other "spectacle" buildings as the most pressing design problems of our time. The New Urbanists have been wrestling with these issues for more than two decades. Their plans don't represent the final word; they have no statutory authority and will require millions of dollars in public and private investment to be realized.

But they do form a significant starting point for debate.
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Would that urban design be on the agenda from the get-go in Washington, DC.