LSU Landscape Architecture Professors and Students Show Jefferson Parish How to Rebuild Lakefront

April 11, 2007 —While sitting in his dark, sweltering house still without power a few days after Hurricane Katrina, Bruce Sharky began pondering what he, an LSU landscape architecture professor, could do to help the flood-ravaged region. He also began thinking of ways to use the disaster as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to teach his students at the LSU College of Art and Design.

What Sharky came up with was a project that has resulted in a formal plan for rebuilding the Jefferson Parish lakefront – a plan so impressive that parish leaders have formally adopted it as the blueprint they will use to seek state and federal funds for reconstruction along Lake Pontchartrain.

“I hope the students recognize the significance of this,” said Sharky, a 16-year-veteran of the LSU School of Landscape Architecture. “This kind of thing doesn’t happen very often.”

The project came together within weeks after the hurricane. Sharky and associate professor Kevin Risk, who together teach the fifth-year landscape architecture students, adjusted their syllabus to focus on the New Orleans region. With support from the Louisiana Sea Grant College Program, a federally funded program that promotes the stewardship of coastal resources, they spent the 2005-06 academic year developing a comprehensive plan for rebuilding a more flood-resistant New Orleans.

The plan was good and got the attention of the nation’s elite practitioners. The American Society of Landscape Architects, the preeminent professional organization in the field, bestowed an honor award on the project itself, as well as on one of the students who worked on it. Still, impressive as that may have been, the plan remained more of an academic exercise than an actual blueprint the Orleans Parish government intended to implement.

But in Jefferson Parish it was a different story. Officials there were desperate for help, looking for creative ways to fortify the Lake Pontchartrain levee system that rings the parish from Bucktown to Kenner. They wanted a plan they could turn into action and saw what Sharky and Risk’s students had done for Orleans. Essentially, they commissioned them to come up with a similar plan for the Jefferson Parish lakefront.

The students began their work last September, taking half a dozen trips to New Orleans. They met with parish leaders and toured the area to get a first-hand look at the levees and the neighborhoods around them. They also did extensive research, using online resources that provided maps and satellite imagery. By late October they had a draft plan; by early December, it was complete.

The plan is formally titled “Jefferson Parish Lakefront: Rebuilding for a More Flood-Resistant Future.” It is a 40-page report, written in sections by individual students, complete with state-of-the art graphics and computer-generated renderings. Essentially, it proposes rebuilding the wetlands and coastal marshes that once lined the lakefront as a way of providing a natural barrier to the levee system and the inland areas it was designed to protect.

“At one time marshes extended out from the shore of Lake Pontchartrain 600 feet,” Sharky explained. “With suburban development those marshes were damaged and weakened, which made them more vulnerable to the tide actions and winds to the point that now they don’t exist anymore.”

Sharky points out that during Hurricane Katrina, the Jefferson Parish levees did not break, though they were seriously weakened. While they need to be strengthened and upgraded, that will take time and money. A more reasonable and timely solution is to create a protection system for the levees themselves – terraced breakwaters and barrier islands in and around which human-made wetlands can be cultivated.

The plan proposes several alternatives all centered on the basic concept of wetland recreation. Additionally, it suggests various ways of developing recreational facilities like parks and bike paths, wildlife habitats, educational centers and commercial areas for shopping and dining. It also suggests that such environmentally responsible solutions can improve the cost-benefit of the project because of the added uses, which could increase property values and the livability and quality of life.

“The students came up with a range of possibilities and they’re all very impressive,” said Sharky.

The Jefferson Parish Council certainly thought so, as it formally adopted the plan late last year. As a practical matter, that means the LSU plan becomes the blueprint the parish will use as it seeks state and federal funds for rebuilding the coastal lakefront. Though a professional consulting firm will eventually be brought in to implement those designs, the work of Sharky, Risk and their students will provide the foundation on which those designs are eventually built.

“I really believe in service-learning,” Sharky said. “That’s what this is all about – teaching students how to use their profession to make a meaningful difference in society.”

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Michelle Spielman
LSU Office of Public Affairs


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