New Orleans
and the Design Moment
Urban planning and design are practices that suggest we can imagine and
build a future different from - and better than, the present. These visions
of the future city are most necessary when the present is fraught with an
urban crisis – such as the violent, unnatural disaster of the levee failure
following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
Following the disaster in New Orleans, numerous scholars, practitioners
and students have focused countless hours rethinking the future of this
unique city. Design critics, politicians and citizens have also offered
their views on the future of the city with widely ranging and contradictory
visions. This response to the disaster in New Orleans can be described as a
“design moment” in which a crisis created a “terrible opportunity” to
rethink and redesign a city.
In New Orleans, the design moment created by the disaster revealed that
professional design practice is deeply influenced by modernist desires for a
“clean slate” despite the shift to post-postivist modes of thinking and
scholarship in the academy. On the ground in the city, diverse voices have
resisted the clean slate thinking and responded to the disaster as a
radical, humanitarian project, as “watershed” moment for ecological design,
or even as an opportunity to simply repair the torn fabric of a deeply
historic city. Together these contradictory trends suggest the full
spectrum of planning and design thinking at a critical moment in one city’s
history.
For this special issue of the Journal of Urban Design, the guest editors
seek contributions that analyze the design moment in New Orleans following
the disaster of August 29, 2005. We are interested in papers that take an
analytical approach to the major themes evident in the design moment,
including but not limited to: the ecological design challenge, historic
preservation and urban conservation, housing and the urban social fabric,
urban form as cultural/world heritage, and engineering as urban design. We
are also interested in comparative studies as long as they include New
Orleans as a case. We are not interested in question “Should New
Orleans be rebuilt?” That question is irrelevant.
As stated in the instructions to authors, three complete copies of each
manuscript should be submitted to the journal's main office at:
Journal of Urban Design, Institute of Urban Planning, University of
Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
Please also send the manuscript as an email attachment to the theme
editors (see below).
Papers should be typed on one side of the paper, double spaced, with
ample margins and bear the title of the contribution and name(s) of the
author(s). The full postal address of the author who will check proofs and
receive correspondence and offprints should also be included. All pages
should be numbered. Contributions should not
normally be more than 9000 words in length and should be written in the
English language. They should also include an abstract of 100 words.
Footnotes to the text should be avoided wherever this is reasonably
possible.
For more information, visit
the Journal's
website.
Guest Editors: Jacob A. Wagner and
Michael Frisch
Department of Architecture, Urban Planning and
Design
University of Missouri-Kansas City
5100 Rockhill Rd.
Kansas City, Missouri 64110-2499
USA
wagnerjaco@umkc.edu
frischm@umkc.edu
