Sandy Sorlien is a lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts in the School of Design. She teaches one course entitled the Photography of the Urban Place.
Recently, she flew to the hurricane-affected Mississippi coast to take part in a design charrette.
DP: Can you talk about the time you recently spent in Mississippi?
SS: I'm still shell-shocked from the experience a little bit, I have to say.
I was there for two reasons, both connected with the charrette that was done for six days in Biloxi Mississippi. It was part of the governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal. And the governor's commission of Mississippi had invited at least 120 of the "new urbanists" to organize the charrette to help plan the future of the Mississippi Coast.
I've been working for Andres Duany for over a year editing the SmartCode, which is the zoning code and design code for communities, so I was there in one role as head of the coding team, but I'm a photographer of urbanism so I had the opportunity to go a little bit early and photograph existing conditions that the team could use as background and make their renderings for Web site.
They kept pulling me out of coding meetings to photograph some people that they wanted headshots of and that kind of thing, so I had these two roles, which was very exciting and overwhelming.
DP: Can you talk more about the photography work you did?
SS: I have a long history of wandering the countryside by myself photographing architecture and streetscapes, so I feel very comfortable with that. This was a different kind of landscape. I was wandering through in some ways and in some ways it ways it was a familiar landscape.
And what I mean is that this devastation was total along the very edges of the coast and maybe in some places a quarter mile in and in some places a few blocks and in some places more, and it was like a post-apocalyptic scene in those areas and that was a different landscape than what you would usually find in the United States. However in the downtowns where the hurricane damage was partial there were boarded up windows and no one was on the street and all the businesses are closed and some of the buildings are intact and some aren't, that looked to me like so many hundreds of American towns that I had been working in over the past decade, photographing distressed main streets ....
I got to go up in a black hawk helicopter, with some of the team leaders the night before the charrette started and photograph aerials all along the coast which was really amazing, [I've] never done any aerial photography, so those photographs were also useful for the architects and planners who were doing renderings of the individual towns.
DP: Can you give a time frame for your trip?
SS: The charrette was officially the 12th to 17th of October. I arrived the 9th, and then left the 18th with everybody else. So it was about nine days total.
DP: Do you think the charrette was successful?
SS: The charrette was extremely successful in terms of the energy and goodwill that it generated. And in terms of the volume and the quality of the plans and the strategies and the analyses that the various teams came up with.
I mean we came up with one planning team for each of the eleven cities along the coast and each one produced a plan, and this is within really only four days of solid working, there was a day of introduction and a day of touring the sites so it was a very compressed time frame but this is what the new urbanists do, they bring all these disciplines together and work very intensely.
So the production was not surprising, but it still was a beautiful thing to see. It seemed as if the citizens of the different towns were very involved, the people who were local architects and planners and officials and citizen activists working alongside all of us. So it was probably about a 120 from this CMU team and then an equal number of locals they say, working along with, so the whole process was inclusive.
It seemed as if that was much appreciated, and the product was substantial. And the product was a result of our teams listening to what the people of Mississippi wanted for that area.
DP: What time frame do you see for full implementation of the plans that were developed?
SS: There's a 100-day period where everything in terms of what the charrette has produced is supposed to come together and the governor's commission, ... the commission would then recommend to the governor actions to take based on that at the state level. But there are all kinds of local initiatives that would go on, regardless, that have already started.
DP: Did you take advantage of President Amy Gutmann's pledge of paid leave for faculty?
SS: I did in the sense that I don't feel as guilty about missing two classes. Yes, I got that e-mail from her that was right after the storm, and I thought it was a wonderful initiative on Penn's part. Actually, I sent the e-mail around to some other friends of mine at other universities, and I think it influenced one of them to do the same.
And I ended up making up the classes that I missed, so in a sense I could have done it without, but I feel less guilty about it [laughs]. And because my class is about urban photography, it's a really great opportunity to share with them emergency planning for urban areas and how photography was used at the charrette, which was a very intense way of using photography.
DP: Was there any specific process that needed to be done to take advantage of the paid leave program?
SS: I went and spoke with Julie Schneider who is the Fine Arts Department chairwoman and made sure that it would be okay with her. And I believe I spoke to [Graduate School of Fine Arts Dean] Gary Hack also. They were warned that it could happen, and when it was definite I just let them know that I would miss those two classes.
DP: Can you talk about your interactions with locals?
SS: We talked among each other a lot, via a listserv, which is a fabulous way -- I don't think this thing could have come together without that kind of preparatory sort of brainstorming before we got there, and one thing we were talking about was: remember that the people were traumatized, remember that they lost not only possibly their homes, they may have lost some loved ones, but in some cases they've lost their entire town, which is a kind of trauma we can hardly imagine.
DP: Did any experiences really stand out to you?
SS: I think the whole experience really showed how important it is for professionals to be generalists and to know a lot about the different components of community building and how they relate to each other.
You can't build a community just with architecture, you can't build it just with sociology, you can't build it just with urban planning, you can't build it just with transportation and infrastructure, but all these things are connected intimately and connected to the lives of the people that are planning the community for themselves -- that was the biggest lesson to bring away.
