Gone to the new Gentilly Project blog

www.gentillyproject.blogspot.com

Holy Cross School moves to Gentilly

Click here. This is a pretty big boost to Gentilly. Quite a number of residents and others have been working hard on this as part of an larger effort to improve the recovery conditions for Gentilly

Tuesday 7pm Central Time -- Conference Call

Gentilly has 21 neighborhoods. There are color-coded properties in about half. How soon can we have all neighborhoods included?

If you'd like to take part in the next project conference call, email gentilly@dartmouth.edu

If you'd like to suggest items for the conference call agenda, please add below as a comment.

Dillard students join the Gentilly Project

Last weekend about six Dillard University students joined our project. It took them only about four hours to code 350 homes.

In the project, we've produced a public web-based map, generated by community volunteers, that identifies levels of recovery progress with a simple color-coding system: red (blighted property), yellow (property with signs of cleaning or gutting), blue (property that is occupied or exhibits major reconstruction); or green (demolished property or vacant lot).

I am very excited about the progress the Dillard students made this past weekend.

Timeline Maps of Post-Katrina Deluge

Today nola.com has an animated slide show which shows the levee breaches and flooding of the city, down to the hour and minute. Many people outside New Orleans don't have a sense of what got flooded where, so maps help explain it all.

I think this animation shows, in particular, how the deluge wasn't confined to those who were most economically vulnerable before Katrina. I run into people all the time who don't realize the Lower Ninth Ward was filled with houses, not housing projects, and that people of various racial and economic backgrounds died in their attics or drowned in their houses.

Click here for slide show of how the deluge of New Orleans happened. It's a quick viewing.

I like maps

Two lab assistants from the Geography department, Tina and Katie, stayed late yesterday with me to prepare maps of Gentilly for my trip to New Orleans tomorrow.

I've noticed the past couple weeks how important it is to show a physical map of Gentilly, when I introduce this project. It makes what we are doing in Gentilly more concrete, even though the maps are real images. The Gentilly maps we produced and printed is a virtual representation - showing icons and labels indicating streets, schools, churchs, and cemetaries - yet it provides a useful prop to discuss what we are doing.

We made several copies, and I plan to leave them behind for keepsakes of those that I plan to meet with on Monday. And I may bring one with me to Washington D.C. on Tuesday.

Gentilly Charrette starts on Thursday

When I was in New Orleans a week ago, I kept hearing a new word about town. Charrette.

People from different parts of the city were talking about them. In essence, charrettes are an intense design process over a period of days to perform detailed community planning with public input. Gentilly is having a charrette starting this Thursday. Public meetings are at the St. Leo the Great Church @ 7-9pm on Thursday 4/20, Saturday 4/22, and Tuesday 4/25. Here's the full schedule.

How do we reconcile the rebuilding process with the approaching hurricane season?