The Dutch planners and engineers visiting New Orleans last March made much of the similarities of “delta cities.” They face similar dangers and offer similar amenities, but they’re also far different in their history, density, and, notably, attitude toward water. For one thing, says V.J. (Han) Meyer, the Dutch make water the organizing principle for their city plans. The Americans, in contrast, often ignore it.
Meyer, a professor of urban design at the Technical University in Delft, was part of a delegation that spent several days touring the area and participating in workshops with their American counterparts. The question at hand was how relevant Dutch approaches to planning and, particularly, water management, are to southeastern Louisiana three years after Hurricane Katrina. The meeting, one of a series of such events, was organized by APA, the Royal Netherlands Embassy, Louisiana’s economic development department, and Waggonner & Ball, a local architecture firm.
Where’s the water?
On a daylong tour of parts of the area most affected by Katrina, the Dutch had a chance to see the devastation firsthand. The tour, which was led by architect and planner David Waggonner, amounted to a cross-section of city and suburbs, encompassing neighborhoods, key arterials, parks, and, of course, water-related infrastructure.
Waggonner pointed out that in New Orleans, as in Amsterdam, arterials tend to follow the canals and neighborhoods are defined by the broader streets such as Napoleon and Jefferson. Passing the city’s main wastewater treatment plan, he noted the $6 billion infrastructure repair bill faced by the water system. “The number of broken pipes is phenomenal,” he said.
“But where is the water?” asked Martijn Yongens, an engineer for the Rijnland Water Board, commenting on the filled-in waterways that are a feature of southeastern Lousiana. Some, like the West End Canal, were once used for navigation; now they’re covered over.
Reaching Lake Ponchartrain, the visitors were dismayed by the still-evident signs of damage to neighborhoods that were inundated by flood water pouring over the lake banks. Later, the group passed the famous Baldwin Pump Station on North Broad Street and the NASA-Michoud plant, a major economic contributor to the metro area. The plant was able to ride out the storm because it had its own levees and pumps. “A good object lesson for how to protect industrial infrastructure,” said Waggonner.
At lunch in a neighborhood settled by Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s, there was a lot of talk about preserving industrial corridors like Claiborne-Jefferson, which cuts through three parishes. “It’s hard to get people to see that this is something they can capitalize on,” Waggonner noted.
Alike and different
That day and the next, comparisons were made between New Orleans and Rotterdam, its closest Dutch counterpart. Both are port cities located in river deltas, and both have a diverse population. But Rotterdam, with some 580,000 residents, is far more densely settled. The entire 16 million or so residents of the Netherlands, the world’s third most densely populated nation, occupy a space one third the size of the state of Louisiana.
In contrast, New Orleans is spread out, making it harder to protect. In 1960, the metro area occupied 100 square miles and had 630,000 residents. At the time of Katrina, the area had sprawled to 180 square miles, and the city had a population of 480,000. Today, it’s down to less than 350,000.
Tulane geographer Richard Campanella pointed out that 19th century New Orleans was far more resilient than it is today. The whole urbanized area was above sea level and buffered by wetlands. The 20th century brought federalized river control and levee construction. “The rise of the petroleum industry and the building of new canals had all sorts of ecological impacts, including increased saltwater intrusion and continuing erosion of the wetlands,” he said.
Both cities have suffered greatly from flooding in the past. Almost 1,900 Hollanders were killed and 50,000 buildings destroyed in a 1953 flood, many of them in the Rotterdam region. That flood was the result of a ferocious North Sea storm, which swelled the four rivers that flow into the Dutch Delta. Half of the Netherlands is below sea level and 70 percent of the land is vulnerable to flooding.
The Dutch government responded by initiating the 40-year Delta Works storm protection program, which included the construction of 62 floodgates on a 1.5-mile stretch of North Sea coastline. Levees near Rotterdam were replaced with storm surge barriers intended to protect the city against 10,000-year storms. The program culminated in 1998 with the completion of the $1 billion Maeslant Barrier.
The difference in financial commitment is enormous, as APA executive director Paul Farmer, faicp, noted: “Holland spends almost as much on flood defense and water management as we spend on national defense.”
Wake-up call
“Katrina was a wake-up call for the Dutch,” said Hans ten Hoeve, representing the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning, and the Environment. In the Netherlands, he said, people simply assume that the government will ensure that the dikes will not fail.
Since the inception of the Delta Works program, ten Hoeve said, the Dutch government has added new dams and other water barriers as well as newly created freshwater estuaries. The result is a far straighter and shorter coastline, which is easier to protect.
About 15 years ago, he continued, government officials began to change their thinking, putting less emphasis on protection. The change was prompted in part by the first signs of climate change. “They heard predictions of a rise in sea level and greater precipitation,” said ten Hoeve. “And they saw the effects of floods elsewhere in the world.” The new approach integrates water management and spatial planning, as land planning is called in the Netherlands.
At the same time, Dutch planners began to reexamine the question of risk acceptance. Several participants in the workshop noted that the Dutch historically have assumed that the government would protect them against disaster. The idea of hazard mitigation or postdisaster planning was almost unknown. It’s been observed often that flood insurance is a hard sell in the Netherlands and that GIS risk maps, common in the U.S., are rarely used there.
In 2003, the new “spatial water policy” took effect, under the aegis of the national Ministry of Transport, Public Works, and Water Management. The program’s official name is Room for the River, and its underlying principle is that “water should be the structuring principle for land use.”
The policy calls on water planners and land planners to reexamine the concept of “failure-free dikes,” to come up with a long-term strategy to deal with the effects of sea level rise, and to figure out ways of controlling development in flood plains. Slowly, too, said the workshop participants, the Dutch people are beginning to understand that risk management must be part of the process.
Piet Dircke, manager of international water projects for Arcadis, a Dutch-American consulting firm, has worked on projects in New Orleans for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “We have learned from each other,” he says. “For our part, we’ve learned that we need to have evacuation plans, and that we need to learn to accept risk.”
In 2006, Dircke’s firm won a $3 million, multiyear contract to study the feasibility of building floodgates along New Orleans’s Inner Harbor Navigational Canal. The project, modeled after Rotterdam’s Maeslant Barrier, is intended to protect the Industrial Canal from a storm surge. In March, the Army Corps’s Hurricane Protection Office announced that it would shift $800 million from other projects to build the two gates. Congress authorized such shifts last year.
Rotterdam has its own spatial water policy, says Arnaud Molenaar, deputy head of the city’s Department of Water Management and manager of the Climate Proof program.
“We’ve realized for several years that we had to meet the challenge of climate change,” says Molenaar. In 2005, prompted by a plan created in conjunction with an international architecture exhibit, Rotterdam planners drafted a local water plan that incorporates such innovative proposals as flexible dikes and floating houses. The plan focuses on increasing stormwater storage capacity to minimize the flooding caused by heavy rainfall.
In the end, says Molenaar, the local water boards accepted Waterplan Rotterdam as a way to improve life in the city. In the Netherlands, he notes, the water boards, which are organized around natural drainage areas and often predate the cities, have much power. They raise their own taxes and make their own decisions.
“Spatial planning has to become climate proof,” he says. “Today, Rotterdam has only minor flooding, but what will happen in the future? How should we design and develop new areas inside and outside the dikes?”
What can we learn?
“Thank God for the Dutch,” said New Orleans banker R. King Milling after listening to the workshop presentations. “You have what we don’t have in this country, and that is a true national mandate. We need a structure that will help us focus on the issue at hand—restoration and protection.”
And despite some grumbling about carpetbaggers, local planners and others seem to welcome the Dutch insights.
“Planning is almost a new art for New Orleans. We do things by culture, neighborhoods, groups,” said Jessie Smallwood, former director of the city’s beleaguered public housing authority, at a pre-workshop dinner. “But now we’re in serious need of learning how to patch up our city. We want you to come back so we can learn from you—and you can learn from us.”
Consultant Stephen Villavaso, faicp, echoed those thoughts in a phone interview. “Some people might object to outsiders coming in, but I don’t. My great grandfather worked for the Corps of Engineers, helping to build levees from Natchez to the mouth of the river. And those levees did not fail. But now we need new solutions. The Dutch are not afraid of big projects, although they may take years to put in place. We can learn from that,” says Villavaso, who is president of APA’s Louisiana chapter and was a consultant for the first comprehensive post- Katrina plan, the Unified New Orleans Plan.
Larry McKee is a civil engineer in Baton Rouge, 75 miles northwest of New Orleans. He is a member of the Southeastern Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, one of the two agencies created last year to streamline the 20 levee districts. He said the lesson he took from the workshop is the need for regional cooperation.
The levee districts were created by the 1928 Federal Flood Protection District Act, which was amended in 1965 after Hurricane Betsy to protect the Lake Ponchartrain area from future storms. In 1989, after Hurricane Hugo, the completion date for lakefront improvements was moved forward because of rising costs.
After Katrina, said McKee, “there was major finger pointing.” The state said one problem was the leadership of the districts. The solution was two levee authorities, one on each side of the river. (Another member of the commission is historian John Barry, author of the 1997 book, The Rising Tide, about the 1927 Mississippi flood.)
For Walter Brooks, Jr., the executive director of the Regional Planning Commission, which covers five parishes, or counties, the contrast with the Dutch experience could not be greater. “Most of the mitigation here is done at the parish level,” he says. “Hardly anyone is looking at regional efforts.”
There has been some post-Katrina discussion of a regional approach, he says, starting with the Bring New Orleans Back plan. As cochair of the land-use committee for that effort, he recalls proposals to use the region’s natural barriers and even railroad embankments to create Dutch-type polders to contain flooding. “We need to look at water storage in new ways, which could also mean open swales instead of concrete ditches,” he says.
Brooks would also extend the definition of “region.” “I’d like to see the Dutch work with the corps to look at the entire Mississippi River Basin,” he says. (He was speaking months before this summer’s disastrous floods in the Midwest.)
Stephanie Pedro, a young planner and GIS analyst for the regional commission, has no doubt of the value of a fresh eye. “Yes, we can learn from outsiders,” she says, although their standards may be quite different. Most Europeans, she notes, are willing to pay for a far higher level of protection.
On the other hand, the Dutch, and the British as well, are making a lot of low-tech, and lower cost, improvements—in retaining surface water on-site, for instance—that could be copied here. Pedro is a member of the regional planning commission’s newly created technical advisory committee for regional sustainability, which is in the process of identifying demonstration projects.
We need all the help we can get, says Earthea Nance, manager of infrastructure and planning for the New Orleans Office of Recovery Management, a recently created city agency headed by longtime planner Edward Blakely. She is committed to integrating hazard mitigation into the city’s new master plan and its building code, and her small staff is busy applying for FEMA grants, working on a hazard mitigation plan, and mapping hazard risks in all 17 target areas—a process that will take several years, she says.
And what can the Dutch do? “I would like them to create a sort of board of advisers for the hazard mitigation plan,” she says, “and possibly to set up some demonstration projects.” (Recently, a proposal was made to the city council to amend the city charter to require local agencies to follow the master plan that is now being drafted by a team led by the Boston-based firm, Goody Clancy. In mid-July, the council voted unanimously to put the charter amendment on the November ballot.)
The buzz
The workshop produced a slew of proposals for joint projects—from a workshop on regional planning skills to a roundtable of American and Dutch water planners. But the phrase that created the most buzz was “delta urbanism.”
“What struck us most about New Orleans,” said Han Meyer, “is that you are a city in a delta, just like Rotterdam. And that is both a problem and an opportunity. It’s a situation that you can take advantage of—both for flood defense and as a structural element in city planning.” Use the concept, he suggested, as a way to integrate infrastructure, to organize space efficiently and sustainably, to share costs, and to boost civic pride.
“You can also use it organize a comprehensive plan that makes water planning an integral element of the city, and to jumpstart a larger regional plan.” The Dutch planners would be happy to help with both, he concluded.
That point—about making water planning an integral part of other plans—is music to the ears of architect David Waggonner. “I’ve always believed that we needed a water plan for New Orleans. People think about the riverfront, but no one is thinking about water connections between the lake, and the river. Even the master plan that is now being drafted does not have that as a priority.”
“What we need is a strategic vision plan to inform the master plan. Hearing how the Dutch have turned their water resources into attractive assets is a good thing.” Interest in the Dutch template is growing locally, Waggonner says.
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