Building Resilience: Connecting Water, Landscape and Community in the Mississippi River Delta

Abstract

Humans have altered the natural flow of the Mississippi River Delta through settlement structures and a layered set of scalar infrastructural systems creating a complex hybrid landscape. These changes to the natural landscape at the largest scale, compounded by non-porous surfaces and unconnected green spaces and water systems at the city scale, are exacerbated by climate change, especially in low lying neighbourhoods. Historically, racialized and social inequalities segregated people of colour to low lying areas which make the issues of climate change challenging to recover from. The design proposal for the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans uses architecture as a mediator connecting land-water infrastructures and people with social programming to engage and bring awareness to issues of climate change, while empowering the community through resilience. The theoretical framework of ecological urbanism brings together natural and infrastructural systems using intersectionality to connect ecology and hydrology to the neighbourhood.