Ties to New Orleans help professor chart new UW course

By Kathleen Schmitt

kmschmitt@aqua.wisc.edu

David Hart spent the spring semester feeding history, geography and jambalaya to students in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning.

His course, “Rethinking New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina,” (http://coastal.lic.wisc.edu/urpl969-katrina/) provided a glimpse into the cultural and historical significance of the city, as well as giving students a chance to help envision its future. As the semester draws to a close, they’ll present their ideas to planners working on the front line of reconstruction in Louisiana.

Hart is a coastal outreach specialist in geographic information systems (GIS) at the UW–Madison Sea Grant Institute, but he’s never lost touch with his bayou roots. His grandmother grew up in New Orleans, and he lived there for 10 years. Like many others, Hart watched the hurricane’s aftermath unfold and wondered how he could help.

“The first thing you do is write a check to the Red Cross,” he says. “So I did that, and then you kind of sit back and wait. I knew I couldn’t just hop in a car and go down there without direction because you’re just going to be a problem, not an answer for anything.”

Hart had valuable experience to offer. Before moving to Madison to earn his Ph.D., he worked as a city planner in New Orleans, managing its GIS program.

GIS uses computer software to link maps and databases. Information in the databases can be presented as layers on the map that can be turned on and off. Linking geographic information with data about property taxes, crime statistics, power outages and health hazards make GIS a powerful tool for analyzing urban and environmental problems.

In fact, GIS proved to be a critical tool in the days immediately following Hurricane Katrina. With many street signs underwater or washed away, rescue teams had difficulty finding locations of people in trouble until they gained access to GIS databases that linked street addresses to specific latitude and longitude coordinates. GIS maps were used by the local, state and federal governments, as well as the media, to understand the extent of damage and loss of life.

But Hart, who has close friends and relatives living in the area, was still 1,000 miles away wondering how he could help.

“I was feeling kind of powerless, so I came up with this idea,” he says. “I had an opportunity to teach a GIS class in urban planning. I knew there would be plenty of need for mapping and understanding what’s going on in New Orleans, not just in the short term but in the longer term, too.”

Hart immediately set about developing a course to explore ideas and recommendations of how to rebuild New Orleans in a sustainable and more socially equitable manner. Seventeen graduate students rose to the challenge.

In the beginning of the class, Hart found himself trying to explain what it means to miss New Orleans. Many of his students had never visited the city, so he did his best to describe its culture and significance.

“You can’t substitute driving down Magazine Street on a warm night with your windows down, or walking into a neighborhood restaurant…There’s no other place like it in this country,” he says.

The class read Tom Piazza’s “Why New Orleans Matters,” and Hart brought in homemade jambalaya, a King cake and videos of his then year-old son enjoying Mardi Gras.

He also introduced the students to some of New Orleans’ problems: namely, sea-level rise and subsidence.

“This is a city that’s below sea level, surrounded by levees like a giant bowl, and it’s sinking,” says Hart. “It’s one of the most vulnerable cities in the world to a major hurricane, so naturally there are going to be a number of people who would question why anyone would ever want to rebuild down there. But it’s important to understand that the damage wasn’t uniform — some older areas of the city didn’t flood at all.”

Experts in coastal hazards, disaster response and recovery, sustainable development, public participation and GIS dropped in on the class to share their perspectives. The students also began collaborating with planners in Louisiana, including Hart’s colleague John Davis at Louisiana Sea Grant. Using WisLine Web, UW-Extension software that hosts live, interactive meetings, they discussed the current and future GIS needs in the area and how they could be addressed by two class projects.

The first project is developing a GIS template to help neighborhoods in New Orleans plan for their futures. The students looked for ideas from Web-mapping sites around the country and developed a list of GIS data sets needed to support planning on the neighborhood level where many decisions are being made. As an example of how such a template might work, they assembled GIS information for the Pontilly neighborhood, located just south of Lake Pontchartrain. They produced a few initial maps to identify the neighborhood’s assets, such as cultural landmarks, and rebuilding challenges, such as low elevations and damaged infrastructure.

The other project examines subsidence (or sinking land) and elevation data in Orleans Parish to get an idea of what the elevation of New Orleans will be in the future. Hart notes this project is very exploratory, but it could be a good starting point for other studies to determine where and where not to rebuild.

Using WisLine Web again, the students will present their results to their Louisiana cohorts today (May 3). But Hart hopes their involvement and enthusiasm won’t end with the semester.

“One student, Ryan Ziegelbauer, already went down to New Orleans during spring break as part of the UW Alternative Breaks program,” he says, “and a few others are hoping to travel there after classes are over. So they have a personal stake in this.”

As for Hart, his next trip to the Crescent City is already scheduled — in his syllabus, no less. After the last class, he and his son hope to drive down for Jazz Fest, dubbed as a cathartic homecoming for thousands of musicians. Held in an area of the city that experienced significant damage, the fact that the festival will go on, Hart says, is a testament to the resiliency of New Orleans.