Sustainable Change
MSU and LSU Partner in Haiti’s Recovery
By Ferdinand Mehlinger
On Jan. 12, 2010, the most devastating earthquake in Haiti’s history leveled its capital, killed more than 230,000 people and made more than a million homeless. Last October, just nine months after the disaster, a landscape architectural planning team composed of 25 students and professors from Morgan State University and Louisiana State University touched down at Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport in Port-au-Prince. Their mission: with limited time, and an austere budget, become catalysts for self-sustainable change in Jacmel, Haiti, during Haiti’s reconstruction. What greeted the team was one thing to read about but quite another to experience on the ground. Most people in Portau-Prince were back to living and were attempting to rebuild. But the disaster had displaced many residents from the city of 2.3 million, and there was still a tremendous amount of rubble where buildings had been.
The team leaders, professor Diane Jones of Morgan and professor Austin Allen of LSU’s Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture, have strong ties to New Orleans: Jones is a former and Allen is a current resident of the city. For them, and others, the lessons from New Orleans’ painful recovery from Katrina still offered fresh clues about how best to approach the situation in Haiti. The cross-disciplinary team of scholars set out to apply lessons learned from the hurricane and build a bridge between academic theory and the real world. “We are teaching processes here on how to relate to a project and the needs of the people and the specifics of the culture,” says Jones. “We are not here just to get involved and leave. We want these projects to become sustainable to the people that are here.” Joining the team leaders were MSU’s Dale Green, lecturer in the School of Architecture and Planning; Debra
Proposed Promenade Paving Scheme
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Newman Ham, Ph.D., professor of History and Geography, and Robin Howard, associate director of the Office of Museums. Four students from Morgan’s graduate landscape architectural program — Amie West (’11), Molly Garrett (’11), A. Zevi Thomas (’11) and Jayne Mauric (’12) — and 15 fifth-year students at LSU’s Reich School made up the bulk of the team. “Morgan not only represented another point of view from another part of the country, but as an HBCU it also offered a chance for partnership,” says Allen of LSU. “I think that is the future of higher education: …knowing how to work in integrative fashion where you have interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary work in an integrative approach of disciplines, institutions, individuals bringing their expertise to the table. And that is something where landscape architects have had a history of being great.”