“Wetland Frontier” aims to facilitate the regeneration of New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward community and the adjacent Bayou Bienvenue Wetland Triangle—both currently ghosts of their former selves after historical neglect and segregation.
Wetland Frontier. © Annabelle Tan.
Jury
Mina Hasman
Kent Jackson
Phil Obayda
Koen Steemers
Simon Sturgis
Following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has undergone a patchy recovery, rife with contestation and doubts. Even with new flood defense systems, experts question the long-term resilience of New Orleans which has historically been at odds with nature. Tackling the issue of urban resilience, the scheme is a speculative master plan that challenges the current approaches toward disaster-prevention and landscape engineering in New Orleans.
Straddling a six-foot levee, the proposal aims to facilitate the regeneration of the Lower Ninth Ward community and the adjacent Bayou Bienvenue Wetland Triangle—both currently ghosts of their former selves after historical neglect and segregation. A multistakeholder premise creates a narrative of cooperative value-creation through the restoration of a lost wetland. By tapping on the wetland’s potential economic, recreational, educational, and ecological benefits, the scheme both attracts, mobilizes, and retains a demographic that matures with restoration efforts.
While newcomers initially attracted to this pioneer community become rooted to the local community, cypress saplings begin to flourish in the newly laid sediments. After a decade, the scheme stretches outwards, blurring the threshold that once delineated human and nature. Family homes spill into the local housing stock and sediment satellites venture forward for the complete restoration of Bayou Bienvenue.
Model View, Wetland Frontier. © Annabelle Tan.
Model View, Wetland Frontier. © Annabelle Tan.
Annabelle Tan
University College London
Bartlett School of Architecture
was born and raised in the city-state of Singapore. She has never known a life not marked by the richness, contradictions, and complexities of multicultural urbanism. This has fundamentally shaped her interest and inclinations as an architect, preferring to observe unfashionably appropriated public spaces, street codes, and which benches people linger on, rather than any one building in itself. On the other end of the scale, her work strives to understand the diverse systems that overlap, interact, and sometimes create friction in an urban ecology, learning how other cities have been built and planned historically and how each of them try to navigate towards some sort of "better" future in the midst of climate change, technological disruption, and social flux. The key is to straddle these two ends of the scale. As such, Tan believes that the architect-planner has an ethical duty to live and act as one amongst many in order to envision an inclusive future society and build the necessary city that will shape it.
