team: studio critic w. redfield
Selective layering of spatial data allows a cogent narrative to emerge.
This plate layers the extents of holocene-era alluvial deposits and historical flood plains, the Mississippi River’s main channel, tributaries, distributaries, and all land below 50ft elevation. New Orleans and southern Louisiana are almost entirely built on low-lying land formed over millennia by alluvial deposits, the Mississippi River, and its flooding.
This plate shows the balanced relationship between the city and the river during early European settlement.
Plate showing natural and manmade waterways, Mississippi River distributary channels, early European settlement, and batture deposits.
In the wake of infrastructural development that allowed improved drainage capacity and urban expansion in the early decades of the 20th century, the city fabric expanded rapidly to the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. The underlay map illustrates the extents of a disastrous crevasse (levee breach) in 1849, one of the most severe floods the city had experienced before Hurricane Katrina. The overlap between the historic flooding extents and urban expansion hints at the disastrous flooding that occurred after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
As New Orleans confronts human-influenced changes in climate and weather patterns, accommodation of natural riverine cycles (rather than “hard” infrastructural interventions) may restore resiliency and interdependence between the city and its river.