Elise Shelley and Jane Wolff traveled to New Orleans with their second-year students in the MLA programme to collaborate with an architecture studio led by Derek Hoeferlin at Washington University in Saint Louis. The focus of the University of Toronto and Washington University studios is to develop strategies for water management in post-Katrina New Orleans. Their work will support Dutch Dialogues, a design initiative led by David Waggonner of Waggonner and Ball Architects and sponsored by the American Planning Association. The goals of the effort are to promote discussion between Dutch engineers and Louisiana planners and to produce an integrated water management plan for the city. In New Orleans, the students presented their work to Mr. Waggonner and other prominent members of the New Orleans planning community, including Richard Campanella, a geographer and the associate director of the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane University, and Elizabeth Mossop, a practicing landscape architect and the director of the LSU School of Landscape Architecture.

Research work from the studio is being presented by Mr. Waggonner at Aquaterra, the Second World Forum on Delta & Coastal Development, in Amsterdam on February 10 and 11. Please click here to go to the Aquaterra web site for more information.