Blue and Green Corridors Project

The Blue and Green Corridors Project is located in the Gentilly Neighborhood, an area that suffers from frequent flooding and has a lack of facilitates to help residents lead healthy and active lifestyles. Our job? To develop a comprehensive neighborhood re-envisioning that would improve the resiliency, health, and economic framework of Gentilly.

Our neighborhood redesign uses large neutral grounds to store water during flood events and create beneficial water areas to enhance the community. Elysian Fields Avenue will have a beautifully planted canal with water features and play spaces that bring the community together. Green infrastructure interventions were designed to reintroduce water to the ground, and a network of biking and pedestrian facilities (using a complete streets approach) were designed to create new connections to the places where the residents work, play, and live.

The project is funded by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and we conducted an  analysis to show that the benefits of the improvements exceed the costs of the project. We quantified the improvements with a triple bottom line analysis to capture the effect of flood reductions, healthier lifestyles, and economic activity, showing improvements in all three categories.