The devastation brought upon New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee system failure has forced urban theorists to revisit the fundamental question of urban geography and planning: What is a city? Is it a place of memory embedded in architecture, a location in regional and global networks, or an arena wherein communities form and reproduce themselves?
Planners, architects, policymakers, and geographers from across the political spectrum have weighed in on how best to respond to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina. The thirteen contributors to What Is a City? are a diverse group from the disciplines of anthropology, architecture, geography, philosophy, planning, public policy studies, and sociology, as well as community organizing. They believe that these conversations about the fate of New Orleans are animated by assumptions and beliefs about the function of cities in general. They unpack post-Katrina discourse, examining what expert and public responses tell us about current attitudes not just toward New Orleans, but toward cities. As volume coeditor Phil Steinberg points out in his introduction, “Even before the floodwaters had subsided . . . scholars and planners were beginning to reflect on Hurricane Katrina and its disastrous aftermath, and they were beginning to ask bigger questions with implications for cities as a whole.”
The experience of catastrophe forces us to reconsider not only the material but the abstract and virtual qualities of cities. It requires us to revisit how we think about, plan for, and live in them.
Phil Steinberg (Editor) PHIL STEINBERG is an associate professor of geography at Florida State University. He is the author of The Social Construction of the Ocean and coauthor of Managing the Infosphere.
Rob Shields (Editor) ROB SHIELDS is a Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Departments of Sociology and Art and Design at the University of Alberta. His books include Places on the Margin and Lefebvre, Love and Struggle.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii Introductions What Is a City? Katrina's Answers Phil Steinberg 3 New Orleans' Culture of Resistance Jordan Flaherty 30 Materialities Introduction: "Explicit Ruins: Architecture Is More Visible When It Fails" Fernando Lara 57 On Flexible Urbanism Geoff Manaugh Nicola Twilley 63 Delta City Rob Shields 78 Mobilities Introduction 95 Mobility and the Regional Context of Urban Disaster Hugh Bartling 99 Uneven Mobilities and Urban Theory: The Power of Fast and Slow Matthew Tiessen 112 Memories Introduction 125 Remembering the Forgetting of New Orleans Daina Cheyenne Harvey 129 Repair and the Scaffold of Memory Elizabeth V. Spelman 140 Divisions and Connections Introduction 155 Repositioning the Theorist in the Lower Ninth Ward C. Tabor Fisher 159 Understanding New Orleans: Creole Urbanism Jacob A. Wagner 172 On Street Life and Urban Disasters: Lessons from a "Third World" City Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria 186 References 203 Contributors 223 Index 225
