Geographies of New Orleans


Book Description

Geographies of New Orleans integrates hundred of historical sources with custom-made maps, graphs, photos, and satellite images to explore the intricate urban fabrics of one of the world's most fascinating cities from its fragile deltaic terrain to its striking built environment, from its diverse ethnic makeup to its devastation by Hurricane Katrina.







Cityscapes of New Orleans


Book Description

Exploring the Crescent City from the ground up, Richard Campanella takes us on a winding journey toward explaining the city’s distinct urbanism and eccentricities. In Cityscapes of New Orleans, Campanella—a historical geographer and professor at Tulane University—reveals the why behind the where, delving into the historical and cultural forces that have shaped the spaces of New Orleans for over three centuries. For Campanella, every bewildering street grid and linguistic quirk has a story to tell about the landscape of Louisiana and the geography of its bestknown city. Cityscapes of New Orleans starts with an examination of neighborhoods, from the origins of faubourgs and wards to the impact of the slave trade on patterns of residence. Campanella explains how fragments of New Orleans streets continue to elude Google Maps and why humble Creole cottages sit alongside massive Greek Revival mansions. He considers the roles of modern urban planning, environmentalism, and preservation, all of which continue to influence the layout of the city and its suburbs. In the book’s final section, Campanella explores the impact of natural disasters as well-known as Hurricane Katrina and as unfamiliar as “Sauvé’s Crevasse,” an 1849 levee break that flooded over two hundred city blocks. Cityscapes of New Orleans offers a wealth of perspectives for uninitiated visitors and transplanted citizens still confounded by terms like “neutral ground,” as well as native-born New Orleanians trying to understand the Canal Street Sinkhole. Campanella shows us a vibrant metropolis with stories around every corner.




Development Drowned and Reborn


Book Description

Development Drowned and Reborn is a “Blues geography” of New Orleans, one that compels readers to return to the history of the Black freedom struggle there to reckon with its unfinished business. Reading contemporary policies of abandonment against the grain, Clyde Woods explores how Hurricane Katrina brought long-standing structures of domination into view. In so doing, Woods delineates the roots of neoliberalism in the region and a history of resistance. Written in dialogue with social movements, this book offers tools for comprehending the racist dynamics of U.S. culture and economy. Following his landmark study, Development Arrested, Woods turns to organic intellectuals, Blues musicians, and poor and working people to instruct readers in this future-oriented history of struggle. Through this unique optic, Woods delineates a history, methodology, and epistemology to grasp alternative visions of development. Woods contributes to debates about the history and geography of neoliberalism. The book suggests that the prevailing focus on neoliberalism at national and global scales has led to a neglect of the regional scale. Specifically, it observes that theories of neoliberalism have tended to overlook New Orleans as an epicenter where racial, class, gender, and regional hierarchies have persisted for centuries. Through this Blues geography, Woods excavates the struggle for a new society.




Tremé


Book Description

Across Rampart Street from the French Quarter, the Faubourg Tremé neighborhood is arguably the most important location for African American culture in New Orleans. Closely associated with traditional jazz and “second line” parading, Tremé is now the setting for an eponymous television series created by David Simon (best known for his work on The Wire). Michael Crutcher argues that Tremé’s story is essentially spatial—a story of how neighborhood boundaries are drawn and take on meaning and of how places within neighborhoods are made and unmade by people and politics. Tremé has long been sealed off from more prominent parts of the city, originally by the fortified walls that gave Rampart Street its name, and so has become a refuge for less powerful New Orleanians. This notion of Tremé as a safe haven—the flipside of its reputation as a “neglected” place—has been essential to its role as a cultural incubator, Crutcher argues, from the antebellum slave dances in Congo Square to jazz pickup sessions at Joe’s Cozy Corner. Tremé takes up a wide range of issues in urban life, including highway construction, gentrification, and the role of public architecture in sustaining collective memory. Equally sensitive both to black-white relations and to differences within the African American community, it is a vivid evocation of one of America’s most distinctive places.




Lincoln in New Orleans


Book Description

Lincoln in New Orleans reconstructs, to levels of detail and analyses never before attempted, the nature of Lincoln's two flatboat journeys to New Orleans and examines their influence on Lincoln's life, presidency, and subsequent historiography. It also sheds light on river commerce and New Orleans in the antebellum era.




Bienville's Dilemma


Book Description

All New Orleans' glories, tragedies, contributions, and complexities can be traced back to the geographical dilemma Bienville confronted in 1718 when selecting the primary location of New Orleans. "Bienville's Dilemma" presents sixty-eight articles on the historical geography of New Orleans, covering the formation and foundation of the city, its urbanization and population, its "humanization" into a place of distinction, the manipulation of its environment, its devastation by Hurricane Katrina, and its ongoing recovery.




Territories of Poverty


Book Description

Territories of Poverty challenges the conventional North-South geographies through which poverty scholarship is organized. Staging theoretical interventions that traverse social histories of the American welfare state and critical ethnographies of international development regimes, these essays confront how poverty is constituted as a problem. In the process, the book analyzes bureaucracies of poverty, poor people’s movements, and global networks of poverty expertise, as well as more intimate modes of poverty action such as volunteerism. From post-Katrina New Orleans to Korean church missions in Africa, this book is fundamentally concerned with how poverty is territorialized. In contrast to studies concerned with locations of poverty, Territories of Poverty engages with spatial technologies of power, be they community development and counterinsurgency during the American 1960s or the unceasing anticipation of war in Beirut. Within this territorial matrix, contributors uncover dissent, rupture, and mobilization. This book helps us understand the regulation of poverty—whether by globally circulating models of fast policy or vast webs of mobile money or philanthrocapitalist foundations—as multiple terrains of struggle for justice and social transformation.




Geographies of Privilege


Book Description

How are social inequalities experienced, reproduced and challenged in local, global and transnational spaces? What role does the control of space play in distribution of crucial resources and forms of capital (housing, education, pleasure, leisure, social relationships)? The case studies in Geographies of Privilege demonstrate how power operates and is activated within local, national, and global networks. Twine and Gardener have put together a collection that analyzes how the centrality of spaces (domestic, institutional, leisure, educational) are central to the production, maintenance and transformation of inequalities. The collected readings show how power--in the form of economic, social, symbolic, and cultural capital--is employed and experienced. The volume’s contributors take the reader to diverse sites, including brothels, blues clubs, dance clubs, elite schools, detention centers, advocacy organizations, and public sidewalks in Canada, Italy, Spain, United Arab Emirates, Mozambique, South Africa, and the United States. Geographies of Privilege is the perfect teaching tool for courses on social problems, race, class and gender in Geography, Sociology and Anthropology.




Cities as Multiple Landscapes


Book Description

Cities are composed of a combination of urban and rural spaces, buildings and boundaries, and human bodies engaged in political, social, and cultural discourses. Together, these combine to create what the contributors to this volume call multiple landscapes. Developing a new theoretical conceptualization of cities, this book unites American and European approaches to comparative urban studies by investigating the concept of multiple landscapes in two sister cities: New Orleans and Innsbruck. As the essays reveal, both New Orleans and Innsbruck have long been centers of multicultural exchange, have strong senses of historical heritage, and profit from the spectacular geographies in which they are situated. Geography, in particular, links both cities to environmental, technological, and security challenges that must be considered in connection with aesthetic, cultural, and ecological debates. Exploring the many connections between New Orleans and Innsbruck, the interdisciplinary essays in this book will change the way we think about cities both local and abroad.