Architecturewriter

Katrina at 20: In 2009 I had the opportunity to visit New Orleans for the second time. The hurricane had hit the city four years earlier. In the Lower Ninth Ward, rebuilding initiatives supported residents in their recovery efforts. I interviewed individuals active in institutions or civil society organizations who played roles in the citywide post-disaster recovery process. One interview I remember in particular took place in a Bywater café with Rick Prose and Laura Paul, representatives from lowernine.org – and the organization is still active today. They still conduct rehabilitation work with volunteers. In fact, they repaired a house built by another initiative, Make It Right. In the course of the Coronavirus pandemic, they provided food security to residents. 20 years after landfall of Hurricane Katrina, the work of lowernine.org takes place in the broader context of community development. Here's a shoutout to the nonprofit organizations that helped New Orleanians return and r...

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 When I began working on the book concept, I had a much larger selection of published and unpublished texts that I considered including in the book.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...