URBANbuild is a design/build program founded by Ila Berman (then at Tulane University) meant to address New Orleans’ deteriorating neighborhoods. This project documents the URBANbuild program’s contributions to the city’s post-storm rehabilitation and contextualizes URBANbuild’s work with knowledge and experience drawn from similar efforts in cities around the world.

The book operates across a wide range of distinct scales—from the macro scale of the region and city to the micro scale of individual works of architecture—and explores innovative design strategies for housing and urban regeneration applicable to cities around the globe.

URBANbuild as a book embodies a similar texture to building a city—in this case, a study for rebuilding a broken city, New Orleans. The scope of the orchestration and complexity of content are both titillated and diffused by the designer’s propensity for detail and ability to unearth the science behind urban planning and architecture.