New Orleans

We got home on Saturday night, weary from our 400-mile journey and not sure what to expect.

There was very little hurricane damage in evidence, and the main victims were the trees, huge numbers of which had blown over or lost branches. One big bough had flattened half of our lovingly tended garden, but things grow so quickly here that we'll be back to normal in a month or so - unlike the thousands of Cubans and Haitians with homes and livelihoods dashed to pieces by Gustav and Ike.

It's also going to be a busy few weeks for the dustmen or garbage collectors or whatever you want to call them, because the accepted way of dealing with fallen trees is to stick them in your bin for collection.

And we're now out of the cone for Ike, meaning that if it continues on its current track, the good citizens of Corpus Christi, Texas will bear the brunt of this weekend's visitation.

On Sunday, I went for a bike ride round the Lower Ninth Ward, which Katrina wiped off the map. It was the first time I'd been there since November, but unlike so much of New Orleans, little had changed; it was as desolate as ever. Most of the houses in this once bustling and mostly black district had been razed to their concrete foundations; others had been smothered by a blanket of weeds.

Here and there people had rebuilt, with whimsical details like fountains and garden gnomes creating an illusion of normality.

I couldn't live here, I thought; it wouldn't matter how picturesque the house, it would be like living in a cemetery, constantly surrounded by absence: silent, empty streets, roofless houses, the ghostly voices of long-departed neighbours blowing in the wind.

But then I turned the corner into Tennessee Street, and suddenly, even on this hot, somnolent Sunday afternoon, it was a hive of activity.

I'd stumbled on actor Brad Pitt's Make it Right project, a community of 150 low-cost, sustainable houses being built right in the shadow of the Industrial Canal levee which breached during Katrina.

Each of these stunning creations, which Pitt commissioned from leading architects, will house a displaced family from the Lower Ninth. Each is raised well above ground level so that when the floods return, as they will sooner or later (thanks to Gustav, they almost did last weekend), they'll suffer the minimum of damage. And each, while firmly rooted in the southern architectural tradition, is very much a product of the twenty-first century.

I coveted all of the houses, none of which will cost more than $175,000, but sadly I'm not a part of the project's target market.

Make it Right is an example of an individual putting his money where his mouth is, and taking direct action to improve the lives of his fellow citizens. In a city where one third of the houses are still uninhabitable, he's planted a few green shoots in a huge, muddy brown expanse of alluvial nothingness - but like I said, New Orleans is fertile ground, so let's hope they take root and flourish.