Delirious New Orleans by Stephen Verderber

Author:Stephen Verderber
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2009-10-15T21:00:00+00:00

5.4: FEMA residential village, Central City, 2006.

1. RESIDENTIAL VILLAGES

The residential village, together with its one-off autonomous installations (see below), was the most pervasive of all intervention types in the New Orleans area in the first year after Katrina. The village aggregations of temporary living units typically ranged from four or five units on a single site to as many as two hundred; the numerous examples erected throughout New Orleans represented many variations in scope within the basic theme. They were, without exception, configured in rows, forming, whenever possible, a matrix in plan. The number of units in a row might be as few as two or three and the number of rows as few as two. The smallest aggregations, two rows of three units, for example, were set up in parks, in vacant lots, and as infill units installed beside existing permanent houses. Residential villages, in infill settings, often housed the relatives of people who had returned to repair and reoccupy nearby houses on the same lot, block, or street.

In the case of larger villages, open lots on school sites, athletic fields, and abandoned fields were deployed. The largest residential village was erected in City Park (680 units) and on the campus of Southern University in New Orleans (400 units). Smaller villages were erected also. A sixty-unit village was erected on South Claiborne Avenue and Jackson, near the downtown area (Figs. 5.4 and 5.5). The Carver Playground residential village across from the Mississippi River levee Uptown housed twenty units on the site.

2. CORPORATE VILLAGES

The scale of the devastation required that the private sector in New Orleans adopt a first-responder stance as a provider of emergency housing. In the first weeks after the hurricane, a number of corporations with operations in the New Orleans metropolitan area made a compelling case to their superiors at the national corporate level to initiate the process of securing temporary housing for their employees. FEMA supported this movement for a number of reasons, including the fact that the agency quickly learned that relatively few large open parcels of land were available in the area for emergency housing. FEMA reasoned that the development of corporate villages would reduce the burden on the federal agency as the first-line housing responder.

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