Gulf Coast: A Vision to Revive, Not Repeat

By ROBIN POGREBIN for nyt
Published: October 13, 2005
BILOXI, Miss., Oct. 12 - The work facing architects and urban planners who convened here today at a battered resort is visible right outside the window. A beach strewn with uprooted trees and the detritus of ravaged buildings. Deserted streets lined by flooded empty houses. Hulking casino hotels gone dark.

Over the next several days, this group of some 200 professionals from around the country will struggle to come up with a comprehensive regional plan to rebuild the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It's a design challenge on a grand scale, covering 11 communities in 3 Mississippi counties damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

On Wednesday, the opening day, many participants suggested that while they intended to respect the local character, they did not hope to replicate what existed before the hurricane.

"People know that this took a wrong turn somewhere," said Andrés Duany, the Miami architect and planner leading the forum. "People know this has become honky-tonk, and this is the chance to get it right."

"This place has lost its neighborhood structure over the last 50 years," he continued. "This is a chance to rezone it in a much finer grain, so people can walk to the corner store, kids can walk to school."

To residents, such conferences often seem like pie in the sky - a bunch of fancy outsiders who gather to brainstorm and then leave impossible building plans behind. But this particular group has been empowered by the governor, Haley Barbour, himself, and includes many local architects and planners. The conference, the Mississippi Renewal Forum, is part of a broader effort on recovery and renewal that Mr. Barbour has commissioned. A report to the governor with broad recommendations is due by Dec. 31.

"The commission's role is advisory; it has no authority to impose any decision on any subject on anybody," Governor Barbour said in a speech yesterday. He called the forum an "inclusive, collaborative, participatory effort that arms the ultimate decision makers."

In addition to design sessions and planning talks, the participants will tour the areas affected by the storm and meet with local officials.

The chairman of the commission, Jim Barksdale, a former chief executive of Netscape Communications, said the priority should be low-income housing. "Rich people take care of themselves," he remarked.

Among the other issues being considered here this week are how to integrate the behemoth casinos that line the coast with the neighborhoods they share; how to create small-scale, high-density streets so that poor people with limited access to cars can meet their daily needs; and how to build hurricane-resistant structures that are not prohibitively expensive.

It is important to move quickly, Mr. Duany said, or mediocrity and homogenization will fill the void. "Things are urgent," he said, adding, "If we don't start now, it starts happening."

The rebuilding effort is already under way haphazardly - casinos have started trying to reconstruct their damaged walls, and people are moving into makeshift mobile homes. The conference is seeking to come up with building codes that will ensure high-quality, well-conceived construction for the long term.

These might include, for example, plans for preapproved mobile homes that are "well designed, so they don't become blight," Mr. Duany said. The conference will consider questions of transit - a railroad that runs the length of the coast is a subject of keen debate - and where civic institutions should be located.

Details matter, the planners say, like parking, setbacks and trees. "There are the kind of trees that support retail," Mr. Duany said. "You plant the wrong tree, people won't shop, because it blocks the signage."

Preparing the Gulf Coast to weather possible future natural disasters is another tall order. "To what extent do you create a kind of gold-plated standard that is resistant to hurricanes but unaffordable?" Mr. Duany asked. "When you raise a whole town on stilts, how does anyone get up there when they're older and in a wheel chair?"

Then there is the matter of the casinos, a crucial economic engine yet a source of neighborhood emptiness. "The casinos are monsters," Mr. Duany said. "We want to integrate them better into the urban and social fabric, so they provide vitality to the downtowns.

"There is a dead void around them," he continued. "They are like atomic power plants. No one wants to live around them."

Because the recovery project in Mississippi is so extensive, Mr. Duany reached out to like-minded members of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a nonprofit organization that works to create compact, diverse, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods and move away from sprawl.

Mr. Duany's Miami-based firm, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, has designed several communities, including Lost Rabbit, near Jackson, Miss., whose master plan specifies various historical styles for housing: French Colonial, Greek Revival, Mississippi Federal.

For some architects and planners, talk of new urbanism can raise apprehension that a rigidly prescribed mix of housing, stores and open squares will snuff out the individuality of various communities.

But participants interviewed on Wednesday said they had no interest in obliterating the indigenous aesthetic of the Gulf Coast.

"Our office is deeply interested in architecture that makes places unique," said Michael G. Imber, an architect from San Antonio. "How can we capture that and carry forward into the future? It's difficult."

"The cities now run one into the next," he said. "You don't realize when you pass from Gulfport into Biloxi, yet they are distinct cultures."