Architecturewriter

On 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. The storm caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans as the flood protection system failed. Nearly all residents evacuated, not all returned. The recovery was complicated by disparate planning attempts. In 2019 TOPOS published my series on snapshots of the city, slightly edited for this presentation.        Lower Ninth Ward floodwall. Kammerbauer, 2017 New Orleans, the „Crescent City“, the „Sliver by the River“: on August 29th Hurricane Katrina triggered a catastrophic disaster in the city, followed by a dysfunctional response and a flawed recovery. Before Katrina, New Orleans was already scarred by racial inequality and social vulnerability that can be retraced within the urban fabric, indicating who lives in which neighborhood and why. The flood evacuation and resulting nationwide diaspora led to a dramatic decline in the number of residents. Eventually the city reached 90 percent of its pre-Katrin...

Katrina at 20: For German architecture magazine BAUWELT, I reviewed the situation in New Orleans ten years after the storm. Despite the difficult recovery, the hurricane inspired new approaches to environmentally sound urban planning ("Dutch Dialogs") and corresponding water-sensitive planning projects in the city (the Urban Water Plan and the Mirabeau Water Gardens). Figurehead of these initiatives is the office of Waggonner & Ball Architects. I had the opportunity to speak with David Waggonner in person and remotely on the firm's inspiring projects aimed at living with, and not against the water. On 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. The storm caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans as the flood protection system failed. Nearly all residents evacuated, not all returned. The recovery was complicated by disparate planning attempts.

Nearly 20 years ago, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Ten years later, I had been researching the outcomes for some time and published "Adaptive strategies of urban disaster recovery planning" as a book chapter in a volume titled "Cities at Risk", edited by G. Sands, P. Filion, and M. Skidmore. Around the same time, I was interviewed by a committee of very high-ranking German academics on the topic and one of them suggested that there had been no planning at all in New Orleans. Based on my research I was necessitated to politely disagree, and explained why – which actually caused agitation in my interviewer. The book chapter shows that the problem wasn't the absence of planning, but instead, its ad-hoc character and the circumstance that it neglected the situation in the city before Katrina – shrinkage, inequality, uneven development, and vulnerability. So, what does the book chapter say? When disaster impacts cities, planners are required to address tw...

One of the most unexpected things that developed in the course of my research on environmental change and cities was that I started analyzing how insurance facilitates adaptation – or fails to do so. Together with my research partners, I published my results based on various case studies. State institutions or private market corporations can provide insurance against natural hazards, they can offer incentives for adaptation (cf. through the NFIP provided by FEMA in the USA), and they sometimes demand that their insurance holders rebuild the status quo ante (cf. Ahrtal, Germany). The latter neither reduces risk nor vulnerability, both key tenets of the Sendai Framework. Now, a Member of the Board of Management of German insurance company Allianz SE posted a startling article at Linkedin on the possible impact of climate change not only on insurance companies, but the entire global economic system. In the article, the alternative to reducing or avoiding climate impacts, i.e. "busine...

Urban Evolution was a performance in public space in Weimar, Germany. Our intention was to address the phenomenon that new urban quarters lack atmosphere or "patina" due to their newness. In other words, they can't tell you a story related to their history or milieu, stories which can be appropriated, stories which give people a sense of belonging or identity. In new developments such stories have to be written first. So, we decided to playfully write a synthetic urban history, with boxes operated by individuals that would represent three different developmental steps. Prior to each step and resultant movement of the box, the individuals would mark up traces with chalk on the paving. The boxes represent phases in urban development, the movements indicate where temporary and permanent structures succeed each other, and each step was represented by different colors. The steps all leave traces behind that can be perceived by observers and users of public space ...

Wildfires in California, again. Posting my 2020 article for TOPOS on conflicting issues of urban development and disaster management and how to live with "mutating" disasters for your perusal here.

Sometimes you get invited to contribute research and then it nevers gets printed. However, this blog is the proper place to present such examples. Here is a text about interrelations between music and cities from an urbanistic viewpoint, with Los Angeles and Slayer as examples.  Lost Angeles: Slayer's Hell Urbanism Author: Mark Kammerbauer Publication details: unpublished manuscript, 2024 1. Introduction: The city as mirage of counter-culture The music, lyrics and visuals created by bands can be indicative of the urban life their members experience. Their work can be seen as a form of dialogue between the music cultures they participate in and the urban spaces they inhabit. This dialogue establishes an interrelation between the musician's city of reality and the music's city of imagination. Perceived this way, music becomes a medium of alternative visions of the city or audible utopias and dystopias. The question this perception raises is: What kind of imaginary city do mus...

About one third of the texts featured in my book "Bavarität – Krisenbewältigung im baukulturellen Raum" are based on previously published contributions of different kinds. When I began working on the book concept, I had a much larger selection of published and unpublished texts that I considered including in the book. This was also the case for a group of texts that dealt with the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the way we inhabit the built environment of Bavaria (and elsewhere). They are good, but they didn't fit into the book. And a blog is a great place to make them available. So I begin today with a brief series of outtakes. The first one is in English and essentially a photo report: De­ser­ted Ci­ti­es of the Heart For a long time, world city with a heart – “Weltstadt mit Herz” – was the official marketing slogan of the city of Munich. Nowadays, like any city subject to a stay-at-home-order aimed at mitigating the impact of the Corona pandemic, it is more akin...

Time flies when you're having an insightful and fun discussion with colleagues on issues you care about. This was the case at the 8th University Day for National Urban Development Policy on „Shaping the Future in Uncertain Times - Paving the Way for a New Planning Culture“, 2nd and 3rd June 2023. Hosted by János Brenner, Detlef Kurth and Silke Weidner, Bohdan Cherkes, Stefan Greiving and I had the opportunity to propose a number of talking points for discussion with the audience, under the watchful eye of the witty Julian Wékel. Our forum topic was "Rethinking Resilience – Security and Critical Infrastructure as Planning Tasks." A key takeaway was that it is entirely justified to talk about destruction to cultural landscapes and cities due to either war, environmental disaster, or both in a joint manner – since the impact of each of them has become ubiquitous due to rapid changes to political and natural contexts. Posting the four related pages from the pdf documentation ...