Borrowed Land

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to conduct research on increasing flood resilience and, albeit to a lesser extent, drought resilience of New Orleans, Louisiana, United States of America. Focusing on the Orleans Lakeside sub-basin, this project builds on previous work through a joint design-engineering approach. This project seeks to address two shortcomings of existing proposals such as the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan: consideration for extreme weather events in the design framework as well as focusing on the integration of technical adaptation measures with the built environment. Hence, the main research question answered in this report is “How can Orleans Lakeside be made more flood and drought resilient by integrating multi-layered resilience capacities of the built environment, whilst safeguarding consistent design of technical adaptation measures within the urban space?”. The development of a design framework and detailed design interventions follows from a synthesis of earlier proposals, supplemented with a vulnerability analysis that focuses on the different capacities of the built environment in dealing with weather events of various magnitudes. For this analysis, the threshold (preventing damage), coping (mitigating damage), recovery (recovering from damage) and adaptive (flexibility to change) capacities of the built environment are investigated. The multidisciplinary approach taken in this project culminates in an urban water management design for Orleans Lakeside which is focused on introducing open water in the urban environment. This design proposal offers a high potential of meeting the required water storage capacity, with the intention to reintroduce the lost identity of wetlands to the suburbs of New Orleans. Typological and urban design across scales aim to integrate water system elements into the urban fabric, and to merge a new water-based urban environment with traditional desired American neighborhood qualities.