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: Evacuation is a common strategy to protect populations from the impact of disasters. This was also true in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. The big problem was that evacuation was contingent on car ownership, leading to highly stressful post-landfall search-and-rescue and evacuation procedures. And while many long-term evacuees eventually found a new home and a new job in cities they were displaced to, Houston being the most significant destination, the process raises serious planning questions. In particular, vulnerable New Orleanians were left with little to no choice regarding their displacement. Is it possible to "design" such a process, by giving people a choice which way forward they prefer once they have been evacuated to safe havens in the surrounding region? My contribution on "Schismourbanism as Design" was published in Yana Milev's extensive edited volume "Design Anthropology". On 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina made lan...

Katrina at 20: In the context of urban climate risks, it is important to acknowledge that urban planning and emergency management planning and preparedness are two different planning domains. The related institutions are more often than not staffed by professionals from completely different academic backgrounds. The first relates to everyday planning in cities with the aim of achieving sustainability and resilience, against the background of uneven development and differential access to resources that cities offer. The second encompasses planning for urban disaster recovery and reconstruction in order to facilitate rebuilding efforts after a storm, a flood, an earthquake or another kind of natural hazard caused destruction of the built fabric. One of the lessons learned in the second case is that a return to "normal" or a condition that (presumably) existed prior to the impact of disaster is inadequate to make cities and their citizens resilient against future disasters. The ...

One recovery planning aim in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina would have been simple – for the Road Home program to prioritize the rebuilding of small rental properties, thereby recreating multiple residential units at once, which would have allowed many more residents evacuated to distant locations to return and rebuild their homes without needing FEMA trailers, which never materialized in sufficient quantities anyway. Why didn't rebuilding the city after the storm happen that way? Why the obsession with single family home construction in a city with such a high share of renters before the storm? "Early on 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall and resulted in the failure of the city’s flood protection system, the submergence of urbanized areas in floodwater, environmental problems through debris, contamination, and accelerated coastal erosion, and the death of almost 2,000 people. The city was confronted with “severe but not catastrophic winds, record rainfa...

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...

This is a political post. To my fellow Americans in my Facebook and Linkedin bubbles, recent events motivate me to comment on political affairs related to my current home country, Germany. As most of you know, I am a dual German-American citizen. I received US citizenship by birth and German citizenship by kinship. When it comes to ethnicity, my parents come from very different spheres within the German-speaking cultural domain, Bavaria on the one hand and the Rhineland on the other. So, what is ethnicity anyway? You decide. Which leads me to current global affairs. Perhaps the most prominent advisor of the US President-elect advocates for the party called AfD, most notably in the German news outlet "WELT". Let us be clear: The aim of the AfD is the abolishment of German basic constitutional law, the Grundgesetz, in order to establish a two-class system rooted in the assumption that a clearly defined German ethnicity or "blood" actually exists that should receive pr...

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...

In "Bavarity", one footnote deals with phenomena that are evoked in the context of architecture and urban planning time and again. These phenomena are of central importance to chapter five and the "Space for Visionary Things" it focuses on. Aura and atmosphere – both are ephemeral, even elusive. We can feel them, but they remain intangible. Nevertheless, they are important to how we perceive the built space of architecture and the city. Footnote number 23 on page 102 indicates that there are pioneers of this mode of perception. They are commonly known as "flaneurs": "Hassenpflug (2006) points out that the aura and what is considered auratic comprise phenomena that can trigger an emotional response. In this manner, they can also serve as basis for creating the atmospheric character of a space – and how to recognize it. The capacity for recognizing auratic phenomena is, in return, a core characteristic of urban actors known a...