Planners to Offer Visions for Coast

By Haya El Nasser
USA Today

October 12, 2005

Turn Biloxi and Gulfport into Mississippi's Monte Carlo, the European gambling paradise on the French Riviera. Make mobile homes look less like mobile homes by adding front porches. Downsize big-box stores and hide their mega-parking lots from public view by putting them behind the stores.

These are some of the grand visions that will be debated and sometimes derided when more than 100 architects, planners, developers and transportation specialists from across the USA descend on Mississippi's hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast today.

They will be there for a week of brainstorming with local officials on how to rebuild 11 communities in three Mississippi counties along 120 miles of shore devastated by Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 29.

The conference is part of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's ambitious plan to rebuild "the right way."

One of the people Barbour has turned to is town planner Andres Duany of Miami, a man known as the father of "new urbanism." That is a movement that embraces old-fashioned town design — communities where people can walk from home to shops and offices, houses with front porches to encourage social interaction and residences above stores.

But it's a movement that has rarely been linked with Mississippi sensibilities. The state, still haunted by its violent civil rights history, often ranks last or close to it in measures of progress from educational attainment to per-capita income. In the public eye, Mississippi and progressive thinking are rarely synonymous.

"New urbanism and Mississippi is an oxymoron right there in the minds of most people," says Marty Wiseman, director of the Stennis Institute of Government at Mississippi State University.

The hodgepodge development boom that spread along the Gulf Coast after the arrival of casinos in 1992 could make locals more receptive to "smart growth" principles that aim to protect the environment and community ties.

"In 30 years, when I'm dead and gone, people will look at what the Coast and South Mississippi have become," Barbour told the Mississippi Legislature last month. "If it is simply a newer version of today, we will have failed those people — our children and grandchildren."

Coastal Mississippi has much tradition to build on.

"The architectural heritage of Mississippi is fabulous ... really, really marvelous," Duany says, referring to antebellum mansions in Greek Revival and Federal styles. "However, what they have been building the last 30 years is the standard, tawdry strip developments. The government's vision is to start again and do it right."

Duany is an expert in organizing planning sessions that get community leaders to reach consensus on what they want their towns to be.

He has rounded up top thinkers in transportation, landscape, design, environment, architecture, community needs and land use to meet with mayors and county executives, business and church leaders, planners and developers, casino owners and poor residents. Many of the professionals are doing it for free or for a fraction of their firms' usual billing rates.

"I can guarantee you (local leaders) are not going to adopt all of these things," says Jim Barksdale, the former Netscape CEO who heads the governor's Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal Commission, which must submit a final report by year's end.

Whatever rebuilding vision emerges will have "to include plans on how you actually implement this," Barksdale says. "The governor's idea of renaissance is what this place is going to look like 20 years from now."

Some reconstruction money will come from the federal hurricane aid package and Small Business Administration loans, some from the state and some from private insurance. But the biggest stumbling block may be market forces. They're already at play along the Coast as land speculators snap up properties along the Coast.

Duany says the key is to create incentives for developers to build the way a community wants.

"The developers will do as told so long as the path is easier," he says.

Some urban planners are skeptical that the ideal of late 19th-century town design, often built around social centers such as schools, churches and community centers, can be adapted to the Gulf Coast's main industry: gambling.

"Are you telling me they're going to do a new urbanist village when the center of the economy is vice?" asks Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. "Casinos in Mississippi were such a pariah land use that they were not even on land. Now they're going to be the basis of a traditional community?"