One December day seven years ago, I was just about the only person driving around Gulfport, Mississippi. Hurricane Katrina had hit three months earlier, and the downtown and neighborhoods nearby still looked like Armageddon—house after house had been crushed or split open by the storm surge. Nobody was fixing anything. People were waiting on the government to draw up new flood maps so they would know what might be insured if they were to rebuild.
By now, a lot of people have rebuilt their houses in Gulfport. Many of them are quite close to the water, just like they were before Katrina. If you look at the street views on Google Maps, you see houses rebuilt, as if no 24-foot storm surge could ever happen again. There was a rule: If less than 50 percent of your house was damaged, you could rebuild at the previous elevation. If more than half was damaged, you had to build above a 17-foot elevation. People who rebuilt low to the ground in the surge zone either squirreled under the 50 percent threshold or they don’t have insurance. Many of these people can’t afford the high cost of insurance, the city’s director of economic development, David Nichols, told me recently. They may have had their house passed down through family, so they have no debt but no money either, and nowhere else to live. Redevelopment in Gulfport generally has been suppressed by unwillingness or inability to rebuild to the mandated elevations, or by a lack of insurance—there are still also plenty of empty sites in town. But for many who have rebuilt, you can see a disaster setting up all over again.
One December day seven years ago, I was just about the only person driving around Gulfport, Mississippi. Hurricane Katrina had hit three months earlier, and the downtown and neighborhoods nearby still looked like Armageddon—house after house had been crushed or split open by the storm surge. Nobody was fixing anything. People were waiting on the government to draw up new flood maps so they would know what might be insured if they were to rebuild.
By now, a lot of people have rebuilt their houses in Gulfport. Many of them are quite close to the water, just like they were before Katrina. If you look at the street views on Google Maps, you see houses rebuilt, as if no 24-foot storm surge could ever happen again. There was a rule: If less than 50 percent of your house was damaged, you could rebuild at the previous elevation. If more than half was damaged, you had to build above a 17-foot elevation. People who rebuilt low to the ground in the surge zone either squirreled under the 50 percent threshold or they don’t have insurance. Many of these people can’t afford the high cost of insurance, the city’s director of economic development, David Nichols, told me recently. They may have had their house passed down through family, so they have no debt but no money either, and nowhere else to live. Redevelopment in Gulfport generally has been suppressed by unwillingness or inability to rebuild to the mandated elevations, or by a lack of insurance—there are still also plenty of empty sites in town. But for many who have rebuilt, you can see a disaster setting up all over again.
The small heart of oyster-tecture is already beating along the coast of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Though embryonic, it could become a full-fledged infrastructure in a matter of years. For that to happen, practical aspects of current oyster restoration methods need to integrate a larger view for its future.
The majority of oyster projects are quite tiny, measuring in the single digits of acres – and even that’s a stretch. Most reefs are no more than a few feet wide by a few feet long. That doesn’t reduce their positive impact. Little is the new big when it comes to oyster-tecture. Larger projects do exist in places like the Chesapeake Bay and off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas. However, they are still a fraction of the size of historic oyster range in the same locations. In fact, if you combine all the projects throughout the eastern coastal states, you don’t have the biological framework necessary for natural restoration. That means that without people actively restoring wild populations, only farmed oysters would endure.
For nature to take over, we have to rebuild the metapopulation of the Crassostrea Virginica – something the current culture of oyster-tecture does not structurally support. Metapopulations (essentially, a population of populations) are a critical mechanism for the evolutionary and genetic survival of any species. Such a population of populations allows both individuals and groups of an organism to be healthy and thrive. Before oysters were overharvested, over-polluted, and their habitats over-developed there was a universe of separate areas that contained millions of individual oysters that interacted along a marine highway of oysteranic (not sure if that’s a word) reproductive interdependence.
Oysters in the warm waters of Winyah and Long Bay (in South Carolina) interacted with those in the expansive marshlands of eastern North Carolina, and in turn, they mingled with those in the rushing tidal rivers of the Chesapeake Bay and Maryland estuaries, and so on into the bays of the south shore of Long Island and the tidal basin forming Long Island Sound, through the coastal plains of Connecticut, and then those Yankee sliders frolicked (in an oyster kind of way) with the populations in Cape Cod and so on and so further into Maine, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia until their habitat dissolved into the icy ocean of northern Canada. This web of invertebrates celebrated each spring with a continental-scale orgy making the Atlantic a soup of oyster-ganismic juice full of the spat formulating the next generation of shellfish.
Project H Design Flickr Photo
Scott Timberg’s article “The Architecture Meltdown” (Salon, February 4, 2012) asks the question “Where does architecture go from here?” without offering an answer, so I will. The piece makes a compelling case f…
