After the Storm: How Universities are Furthering Reconstruction

The latest issue of Cityscape integrates 10 different accounts of higher education’s response to Hurricane Katrina into a symposium that tells a larger story of these institutions' shared commitment to educating students, building local capacity, and expanding the lexicon of community development strategies. Institutions of learning nationwide have joined community-based organizations, neighborhood associations, and groups of local residents in community restoration and building efforts. These experiences solidify the position of service learning in the college and university curriculum, teach students to play a more active role in promoting the public good, and further the cause of good community design.

Contributors to the Cityscape symposium present various projects that involve repairing and renovating neighborhoods, training people to build homes, working through participatory planning processes, preserving cultural sensitivity in restoration, and seeking innovative design solutions. The collaborations among universities and communities described in the symposium provide a glimpse of some of the more exciting renewal and recovery activities taking place along the Gulf Coast:

• A community service-learning project in the curriculum of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Construction Engineering and Management program centers on the storm-damaged homes of Orleans Parish in New Orleans. These homes are being repaired or reconstructed, and new affordable home designs with damage-resistant features are slowly bridging the pre- and post-Katrina eras.
• Louisiana State University (LSU), the recipient of a HUD grant initially awarded to investigate new prototypes for sustainable affordable housing, shifted its focus toward developing a homebuilding training program for New Orleans residents. This shift resulted in construction of the first two post-Hurricane Katrina houses in the Lower Ninth Ward on the north side. A construction team of previously unskilled workers and 13 fourth-year students in LSU's undergraduate architecture program completed the work.
• Grassroots activists and community leaders representing poor and working class residents of New Orleans, together with planning students and faculty from three research universities (Cornell, Columbia, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), overcame racial, class, and cultural barriers to create and promote a recovery plan for the 10 historic neighborhoods in the city's Ninth Ward.
• Residents of New Orleans' Seventh Ward took charge of their neighborhood's restoration to ensure that it would reflect and celebrate their African and Creole cultural legacies. Students and professors from the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Planning are providing design and rebuilding resources to facilitate this grassroots effort.
• Residents and public officials in Harrison County, Mississippi, together with students from Ohio State University's Knowlton School of Architecture, are planning post-disaster recovery that is consistent with community wishes and goals. The goal is to create plans that are transparent and that matter, involving citizens in a participatory process with multiple ways of reaching residents: town hall meetings, an 800 number that people can call with comments and questions, and an online discussion board to keep those with Internet access informed.
• An innovative partnership between the Urban Conservancy and the University of Missouri-Kansas City's Department of Architecture, Urban Planning, and Design focuses on local culture as the foundation for disaster recovery and economic renewal. This joint initiative demonstrates the usefulness of mutual respect and local capacity building in forging viable university-community partnerships.
• The ecoMOD project is a joint effort by the University of Virginia and Habitat for Humanity^® International that, since Hurricane Katrina, has produced an ecological, prefabricated, and affordable home design for a family on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. This flat-pack panelized home design features a super-insulated steel and foam panel system, rather than a wood stud frame, and is being tested for its cost-effectiveness, energy efficiency, and applicability to disaster recovery.
• The Gulf Coast Community Design Studio from Mississippi State University brings its specialized knowledge of planning, design, and construction into focus by learning about the cultural background and interests of a community, which then informs recovery and rebuilding activities. Based on the principle that a community’s beliefs, customs, and values must help shape its approaches to recovery, residents were surveyed about what they liked best about their community and what they most wanted to see rebuilt, restored, or improved. The subsequent plan to rebuild the community strived to restore not only homes, but also the intangible set of values held by its residents.
• When a group of students and designers took on the task of rebuilding Patricia Broussard's East Biloxi home, they knew that building an elevated home to a high standard of quality and sustainability on a very limited budget would require a new approach. The project, known as "the treehouse," became a laboratory for collaboration among students (from Pennsylvania State University, Mississippi State University, and the University of Texas-Austin), designers, construction professionals, and volunteers seeking new approaches to flood mitigation-based design. The techniques explored and lessons learned during the project will enhance building standards along the Gulf Coast.
• URBANbuild, a program of Tulane University's School of Architecture, serves as a lab for researching and developing innovative design strategies for New Orleans. The outreach program concentrates on urban design and innovative, sustainable housing solutions to rehabilitate New Orleans' neighborhoods and revitalize blighted and abandoned areas.

Although born of adversity, these partnerships between institutions of higher learning and local groups offer opportunities to form lasting and mutually beneficial relationships. Despite the benefits and achievements of these learning and service-based projects, however, guest co-editor Kathleen Dorgan cautions that university-community partnerships can also pose challenges. Participants must take care to ensure that the involvement of students, who are pre-professionals, still yields high-quality service. Above all else, Dorgan emphasizes that projects must employ standards of excellence that prevent harm and leave communities stronger, suggesting that design professionals can do more to step up to this responsibility.

Detailed discussions about these projects, along with other features of Cityscape, Volume 10, Number 3, can be downloaded for free at www.huduser.gov/ periodicals/cityscpe/vol10num3/index.html or ordered in print from HUD USER for a nominal charge by calling 800.245.2691.