Since January 2007 I have been working in the Pontchartrain Park and Gentilly Woods neighborhoods as community projects manager with Longue Vue House and Gardens. My work has primarily focused on neighborhood recovery through landscape revitalization and heavily relies on community involvement.
Open Sound New Orleans allows me to connect with residents in a way that goes beyond specific community projects. My personal interest is in how we interact with nature through the built environment. How can we create meaningful experiences with nature and support community empowerment through landscape use and design? In the same way, sound recordings become a tool to help connect nature and culture.
I am presently involved in a project to redesign the Dwyer Canal—a physical boundary dividing Pontchartrain Park and Gentilly Woods, originally built as separate-but-equal subdivisions. I am conducting interviews with various residents of the neighborhoods asking them about connections they have to the natural landscapes, to talk about their relationship to the canal, what the dividing line has meant to them, and to describe their vision for the future use of the space. By broaching the topic of division, I invariably approach the topic of race relations, a delicate and unresolved issue for many in New Orleans.
