As easy as it is to criticize a towns downtown street, it’s much harder to build one.
This hand sketch was inspired by a lecture in Interior Designs Advanced Health Card by Andrew Dugan, who explained masterfully why streets work spatially and also qualitatively. For me, and also Professor Dugan, a street is at its best when you’re in a comfortable atmosphere…next to buildings, trees, intersections, doors, windows and cars. The shade gives us a sense of connectivity between street elements. The proportions make us communicate with each other.
The site we’re working on in Denham Springs, LA is lacking in comfort from materials and from proportion. We, my studio mates and I, with the help from community voices, hope to solve these issues.
We’re going to be working on March 19th at a community engagement meeting. Our studio class will participate in an informal bicycle, pedestrian and downtown revitalization charters from 5-7pm at the City Hall in Denham Springs. The town manager, Jeanette Clark, is excited to have our input.
Our ideas are going to be the impetus for a whole slew of grant applications. The town of Denham Springs flooded heavily in 2016, and will be the recipient of many retroactive Federal grants to better prepare the town for future floods. Additional grants are available, from Federal and State resources, which will help Denham Springs proactively address stormwater management.
A main culvert collects water from impervious surfaces like the buildings and the parking lot in the picture above. We can increase the amount of rain absorbed where it falls by increasing the amount of permeable surfaces. These are things like permeable pavers and infiltration concrete. Planting, at a multitude of scales is the most efficient way to catch, absorb and fix water into the ground.
Street trees, seen in the picture above, are just one way to add vegetation in urban areas. Traffic calming features, like the curb bump out (also pictured above) can be fully vegetated. Curb cuts, make holes in the side of the planting to allow water to flood the trees roots from the street and not just the sidewalk. In cases where you want to allow water to pool, sunken rain gardens feature plants that tolerate flood and drought conditions.
We will be collaborating with an LSU Civil Engineering class to tackle Denham Springs’ water issues. Their issues provide a much more grounded and quantitative analysis of the problems to be addressed. Both of our solutions will work towards the goal of eliminating flooding from mild to medium storm events.
We hope other towns will follow Denham Springs’ lead on managing their own stormwater and not passing the problem to the next town downstream.
Chadd….out
Chadd G Hippensteel 