MIT FEMA TRAILER PROJECT, 2008-2010
In 2008, Jae Rhim Lee worked in the City of New Orleans’ Mayors Office of Recovery and Development, an entity charged with overseeing the city’s recovery after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. While developing a city-wide soil remediation program to address historical environmental injustice in the Gulf Coast, she saw hundreds of marooned surplus FEMA trailers sitting in parking lots, decaying.
At the time, news reports painted a grim picture of these trailers. Many residents were dying from formaldehyde off-gassing in the trailers. US taxpayers had overpaid for thousands of trailers through no-bid contracts. Millions were spent just to park the thousands of surplus, unused trailers.
Moved by the history of environmental injustice in the Gulf Coast and what was clearly a revisitation of those inequities in the form of FEMA trailers housing low-income, often minority residents, Jae Rhim returned to MIT to teach art in the fall of 2009 and launched the MIT FEMA Trailer Project with Ute Meta Bauer, curator and then-Director of the MIT Visual Arts Program in the School of Architecture.
The course was accompanied by a year-long lecture series in the MIT Visual Arts Program (now Art, Culture, Technology) exploring disaster recovery, emergency management, and disaster technology.
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The MIT FEMA Trailer project culminated in The Armadillo: A mobile composting center and vertical community garden, permaculture library, and multi-purpose community space.
The Armadillo, once a symbol of government waste, environmental health issues, and disaster resource mismanagement associated with FEMA trailers used in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the Gulf Coast region in 2005, serves as a model of urban sustainability and transformation.
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The students held skill shares to learn applicable skills for the trailer transformation (including sheet mulching and mushroom cultivation), conducted bioremediation of the old paint factory site where the FEMA trailer was parked.
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Students submitted modest proposals for what the US government might do with the surplus trailers. This project proposed that the trailers be converted into a hospital compound under surveillance.
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This student project proposed that we fill thousands of trailers with toxic soil and send them up in balloons to redistribute risk.
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In June 2009, the Armadillo was donated to a community organization and embarked on a cross-country tour, with stops at the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy in Boston, MA, the National Mall in Washington, DC, and DiverseWorks Art Center & Discovery Green in Houston, TX, among others.
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History of the trailers and produced a timeline of their use,
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In May 2009, the Armadillo was the site for temporary art projects at MIT. Students, faculty, and staff were invited to use the Armadillo as a site for projects which address sustainability, waste, and gardening.
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After it was donated., the Armadillo became a site for compost and gardening workshops.
The MIT FEMA Trailer Project was generously funded by the Council for the Arts at MIT and the Visual Arts Program (now Art, Culture, Technology), MIT School of Architecture. Special thanks to Ute Meta Bauer and Jim Harrington, Facilities Manager of the MIT School of Architecture.