Regenerative habitat
Description
“Regenerative Habitat” offers a spatial test for a climate-adaptive urban model in the face of rising seas, coastal land loss, and increased storm frequency along the Gulf Coast. The project centers on the Bayou Bienvenue Central Wetland Unit, located between Orleans and St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana. Over the course of the past century, this heavily engineered site has converted from a fresh water bald-cypress and water tupelo swamp to open water, leaving the adjacent neighborhoods vulnerable to storm surge. Though stripped of its natural storm surge protection, the Bayou Bienvenue Central Wetland Unit occupies a coveted space within the Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System. As climate change pressures coastal populations to relocate to protected higher grounds, the site offers a location to temporally absorb climate change refugees inside of the levee walls and outside of the subsiding low grounds of New Orleans. Additionally, the site puts forth a model for inhabiting a floodable landscape without relying on the pump system that has exacerbated subsidence in New Orleans. This thesis proposes three strategies for amplifying the ecological and social wealth of the Central Wetland Unit and surrounding neighborhood through marsh terracing, elevated urbanism, and regenerative practices & infrastructures. These three strategies will define the parameters for growth and transformation on the site. Marsh terracing, currently utilized in Louisiana to stabilize coastal land loss, employs a simple cut and fill operation to build up land for marshes. These marsh terraces aim to rebuild habitat, promote biodiversity, reduce shoreline erosion, provide redundant storm surge protection inside the ‘citadel.’ Urbanistically, they also form a spine for a mixed-use urban grid to provide services to the surrounding underserved neighborhoods. Elevated urbanism proposes a method for inhabiting wetlands without draining the groundwater by lifting both utilities and buildings onto piers to form an interconnected ‘mat-building’. Lastly, regenerative practices & infrastructures put forth a form of inhabitation that links urban and ecological metabolisms into a mutualistic relationship. On this site, regenerative infrastructures take the form of circular flows of energy and resources. These practices include: an extensive rainwater collection system for irrigating select marsh terraces with fresh water, a harvesting system for organic waste processed for biogas and compost, a network of microgrids for solar energy production, fields for orchards, and aquaculture with oysters and tilapia. Through these three strategies, “Regenerative Habitat” puts forth an experimental urban model for inhabiting a landscape in flux.