[Building a bigger wall: the Surge Barrier was the largest design-build project in the history of the Army Corps; construction began before design was complete, as a result of the pressing need to complete the barrier by the target date of 1 June 2011. According to Dredging Today, the Barrier is "more than two miles long, 25 feet high and contains enough steel to build eight Eiffel Towers":

"During Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge, a “funnel” created by the levees along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and the levees along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet allowed the surge that came across Lake Borgne to push into the heart of the city, and contributed to the failure of the section of the Industrial Canal that connects the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain.

By moving the surge barrier — the primary protection against flood surge — eight miles east of the city, the hope is the structure will stop much of any storm surge that could funnel into the city, Sinkler said. Sealing off this area should take pressure off those internal floodwalls, which have also been strengthened since Katrina..."]

[The Surge Barrier at the end of May, just before the completion of construction. All photos (except for the screenshot from our partial atlas of Mississippi Floods) are from Team New Orleans' flickr set; if you can't get enough of the Surge Barrier, this panorama doesn't fit well on mammoth, but is definitely worth a look..]

[Lafitte Outfall Canal, one of the three massive concrete slits that drains New Orleans into Lake Pontchartrain in severe rainfall.]

[Orleans Canal]

[The London Avenue Canal; photograph at I-10 crossing.]

[Photographs of New Orleans' outfall canals, by reader Ramiro Diaz (and supplemented with Google Maps imagery).  Diaz works with Waggonner Ball Architects, a New Orleans-based firm which has been doing a great deal of work on water management, infrastructures, and public space in New Orleans since the Katrina disaster, including sponsoring the "Dutch Dialogues", a series of "extended interactions" between "Dutch engineers, urban designers, landscape architects, city planners and soils/hydrology experts" and their Louisianan counterparts.  More photographs can be seen on Diaz's website.]

Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city’s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) But it’s hard to say what people were expecting, given the magnitude of the disaster and the hopes raised in the weeks immediately following. Seventeen days after the storm, President George W. Bush stood in Jackson Square and promised: “We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.”

The terms we, as long as it takes, and help turned out to be fairly elastic. The Federal Emergency Management Agency shuttered its long-term recovery office about six months later, after a squabble with the city over who would pay for the planning process. Since then, depending on whom you talk to, government at all levels has been passive and slow-moving at best, or belligerent and actively harmful at worst. Mayor Ray Nagin occasionally surfaces to advertise a big new scheme (a jazz park, a theater district), about which no one ever hears again. A new 20-year master plan and comprehensive zoning ordinance was being ironed out early this summer, but it remains subject to city-council approval. A post-Katrina master plan has been under discussion since before the floodwaters were pumped out.

In the absence of strong central leadership, the rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects. And this has turned New Orleans—moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems to allow almost anything to propagate—into something of a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life. An assortment of foundations, church groups, academics, corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, young people with big ideas, and architects on a mission have been working independently to rebuild the city’s neighborhoods, all wholly unconcerned about the missing master plan. It’s at once exhilarating and frightening to behold.

Perhaps the most interesting section is the portion on 3428 Dauphine St and Andres Duany; I can’t decide if Duany is being incredibly condescending or accidentally brilliant.