The Gulfport SmartCode charrette was a follow-up effort to the Gulfport Redevelopment Master Plan, a conceptual strategy for redeveloping many areas of the City of Gulfport. Such a strategy became necessary because of the damage and destruction dealt to the Mississippi coastline on August 29, 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, the most devastating natural disaster in U.S. history. Robert Alminana was Project Director as part of HDR and Laura Hall was Community Facilitator as part of Fisher & Hall Urban Design.
The Gulfport SmartCode objectives include providing a diversity of living options for residents on the Coast, making Gulfport’s existing type of traditional neighborhoods legal to build on new sites and enabling the future vision by preserving and restoring the past character of such neighborhoods. The City of Gulfport was one of the recipients of the first Driehaus Form-Based Codes Award given by the Form-Based Codes Institute in May 2007 for this project.
