Waveland, Mississippi as it is
Waveland, Mississippi as it could be
art by David Carrico
Mississippi rising
‘New urbanists’ envision a better reconstruction
Robert Orr ’70 had read all about Hurricane Katrina’s vast and devastating destruction, yet he wondered if it could be as bad as the media reports. Then he flew to Biloxi, Mississippi, on October 12th and saw for himself — “It was worse.” The Connecticut-based architect found a landscape of streets scrubbed clean of buildings, grand antebellum staircases leading to nowhere, and gigantic casinos beached atop historic buildings. “When you are there and walking around in this stuff, it’s mind blowing,” he says.
Orr ventured south six weeks after Katrina hit landfall to participate in a historic gathering, the Mississippi Renewal Forum. For one week, some 300 architects, developers, lawyers, traffic engineers, sociologists, and urban planners focused their creative energies on 11 hurricane-damaged cities along 80 miles of coastline, from Pascagoula to Waveland. Participants, who were paid nominally, gathered in a 12-story casino hotel, from which the views told Katrina’s legacy: a tree-strewn beach, deserted streets, and hulking hotels gone dark. The intense brainstorming session was called by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, eager to seize the opportunity left in Katrina’s terrible wake, a fleeting chance to correct past development wrongs.
“Mississippi has had some really bad disasters, but in each case the reconstruction was worse than the disaster,” Orr says. “If we act fast enough, we can head off bad reconstruction.”
The design conference was organized by the Congress for New Urbanism, which champions returning towns and cities to denser, more pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, a counterweight to car-dominated sprawl and empty downtowns filled with trophy buildings. Over the past 20 years, the movement has steadily proven itself with a growing list of buildings and community projects around the country. In Mississippi, the new urbanists had their first shot at reworking an entire region according to their principals.
Big roads, big retailers, big parking lots — the Mississippi coast had become Anywhere, U.S.A., and the design conference set to the task of mapping a better course.
OLD IDEAS, NEW APPROACH
Orr, who heads up Robert Orr & Associates in New Haven, has been at the forefront of new urbanism since its inception. He worked on Seaside, a community on the Florida panhandle that is perhaps the movement’s best-known new project.
An Indiana native, Orr earned his bachelor’s in history and art at UVM, then studied at Yale’s graduate school of architecture, where he became friends with a like-minded fellow student named Andreas Duany. The term “new urbanism” never crossed either man’s lips back then, but “we both had a lot of doubts about the path of contemporary architecture at the time,” Orr says.
In 1975, two years after Orr’s graduation from Yale, Duany invited him to join the small architecture faculty at the University of Miami, Florida. It was there that Orr, Duany, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (Duany’s wife) hatched a new approach to architecture from old ideas. The threesome studied the elements that make places livable (such as street trees, front porches, sidewalks) and developed guidelines for these details. They reached outside architecture’s ivory tower, joining forces with other professions from urban planners to retail consultants. “New urbanism is not about heroics. It’s not about architecture. It’s about creating a good environment,” Orr says.
In Mississippi, Orr and his team of six brought these ideas to bear on Waveland, a place that essentially was no more. The beach town of 7,000, less than an hour’s drive from New Orleans, was the hardest hit of the 11 communities. A freak wave during the hurricane dragged away nearly every home and business within a half mile of the beach, leaving driveways and walkways to nowhere. A knee-high chunk of wall was the only remnant of the 125-year-old city hall. “It was eerie,” Orr says. “It was swept clean.”
With so little left of Waveland, Orr’s team could scarcely gather a sense of what was once there. They turned to the local citizens, of which only a 1,000 or so were left in the area, for guidance. Hosting a meeting in a Quonset hut, Orr’s team sought out the thoughts of remaining residents. “We were very struck by the people, and listening to their dreams of their city, how they described what they remembered, which wasn’t necessarily what had been there,” Orr says. “These all were shreds of memory.” Orr found that residents often described Waveland not only before Katrina, but before 1969’s Hurricane Camille, recalling an era when the community had more charm.
DRAWING BOARD
Back in Biloxi, Orr and his team put two long days into designing a new Waveland that conjured this nostalgic past and looked to the future. They moved the business district back so it was 1,000 feet from the water. They designed a new Main Street, created a district for the city’s artists, added neighborhood centers, and drew up 15 parks. They created prototypes for trailers that could later be transformed into houses. They designed beachfront houses that would comply with new FEMA regulations requiring first floors elevated 20 feet above ground. Orr proposed connecting them with a raised boardwalk, creating a “Robinson Crusoe” feel.
On the last day of the design forum, all the teams presented their ideas in Biloxi, then packed up their drawings and headed home. Though the forum may have ended, the designing continued. Back in New Haven, Orr and his staff would polish the Waveland plans for another two weeks.
It’s one thing to design, of course, and another to build. The challenges ahead are considerable, ranging from community decisions on adopting the designs to finding the funding to make it happen. While Waveland waits, the forces against new urbanism are fast at work as big box stores rise again and roads are rebuilt twice as wide as before. Time is of the essence, Orr stresses. Moreover, adopting the plan may give the beleaguered residents of Waveland a much-needed ray of hope. “As soon as people have a shared vision,” Orr says, “it’s amazing what can happen.”
(for UVM staff)