The infrastructural complex : a return to big design

Abstract

A new pattern of territorial settlement is proposed for the 70 mile-long strip straddling the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana (here termed the "South Louisiana-Mississippi River Corridor"). Current urban design paradigms at work in the area are ill-equipped to deal with the complex and competing systems within which the city of New Orleans-and any city sufficiently understood-is situated. It was a historical failure to engage with these big systems in the first place that resulted in the disaster of 2005. Such a truly big meshwork of competing interests as exists in the region can only be managed by a radically big re-definition of the scale and magnitude of the area in which design can intervene, harkening back to the territorial plans of the Russian avant-garde or the Tennessee Valley Authority. In South Louisiana, territorial infrastructure has always been the interface between systems and complexes, and it is only through a rapid redeployment of new infrastructures across a sufficiently big scale that a viable, long-term vision for the region can be realized, and only by applying architectural thinking.

(cont.) Along the (relatively) terra firma of the river's natural levee, rapidly-constructed long-distance sediment-transport pipeline become the "spines" for new program in the region, re-situating the significance of earth and water-control infrastructures to the urban form and civic life in the region. These spines absorb the future growth program of the region-whatever it may be. And outside the developed areas along the spines, fields of sugarcane are transformed to fields of cypress trees-tended by the citizen-foresters of the region-ready to be transplanted when mature into the wetlands. Their roots, and the mud coming through the spines of the new human settlements, artificially rebuild the natural buffer between this territory and an even bigger one-the rising, warming ocean.