An Unnatural Metropolis Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Audible Audio Edition) Craig E Colten Peter Lerman University Press Audiobooks Books
Download As PDF : An Unnatural Metropolis Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Audible Audio Edition) Craig E Colten Peter Lerman University Press Audiobooks Books
Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an "impossible but inevitable city". How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis. Craig E. Colten traces engineered modifications to New Orleans's natural environment from 1800 to 2000 and demonstrates that, though all cities must contend with their physical settings, New Orleans may be the city most dependent on human-induced transformations of its precarious site. In a new preface, Colten shows how Hurricane Katrina exemplifies the inability of human artifice to exclude nature from cities and he urges city planners to keep the environment in mind as they contemplate New Orleans's future. Urban geographers frequently have portrayed cities as the antithesis of nature, but in An Unnatural Metropolis, Colten introduces a critical environmental perspective to the history of urban areas. His work offers an in-depth look at a city and society uniquely shaped by the natural forces it has sought to harness.
An Unnatural Metropolis Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Audible Audio Edition) Craig E Colten Peter Lerman University Press Audiobooks Books
I highly recommend this book to students, professionals, and engaged citizens who want to understand how the swamp turned into a city. Some reviewers said the book was dry, but I found it to be extremely interesting from introduction to conclusion. I recommend reading this book along with works by Richard Campanella when studying the history of the urban form of New Orleans. Colton and Campanella have very different tones and outlooks for the future, which will help readers formulate a boarder prospective on the environmental and social issues facing New Orleans. Peirce F. Lewis' "New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape" is another excellent compliment to Colton's work.Product details
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An Unnatural Metropolis Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Audible Audio Edition) Craig E Colten Peter Lerman University Press Audiobooks Books Reviews
"Wresting New Orleans From Nature" pretty much sums it up. Colten's book explains the reasons why and how New Orleans grew in what was essentially an impossible spot for a city. It's a bit dry at times - I find it hard to care about the exact wording of laws regulating sewage in the eighteenth century - as well as outdated, like any pre-Katrina book. It is, however, nicely thorough, covering enviornmental problems such as waste disposal as well as the more unique challenges New Orleans faces due to geography. The best chapters, I found, were those that focus on the systematic inequalities that went into the building and maintaining of neighborhoods.
Colten's "An Unnatural Metropolis" provides a wide ranging view of the environmental issues that New Orleans faces. Whereas we often tend to view civilization and the environment as two separate entities, one having negligible effects in the other's sphere of influence, Colten clearly establishes the crucial impacts of the lower Mississippi delta and the Crescent City on one another. The strength of his work is not only in helping us perceive the myriad of problems, past, present, and future that besiege New Orleans, but also in showing their complexity and interconnectedness.
Laying out a brief overview of the city's physical geography, to include the telling point that its poor site was acknowledged but built upon for strategic reasons anyway, Colten then explains how he is approaching the telling of this history. He does not seek to exclude political and economic factors, but informs us that his emphasis will be on the environment in and around New Orleans. To his thinking this was the prime factor in many of the issues encountered from the city's foundation to modern times.
In the colonial years of the 18th century the prime activities of city pioneers, according to Colten, consisted of extending and raising levees along the riverfront (maintained by individual property owners) and figuring out how to drain the city whenever these levees were breached. As these issues were mitigated to some degree and the city's population increased in the subsequent years following a shift from European administration to that of the United States, other issues rose to the forefront. Sewage, refuse clogging open gutters, acquisition of potable drinking water, and backflow from Lake Pontchartrain through the Carondelet and New canals were some of the other problems to tackle in the 19th century. Eventually, wider ranging problems of expanding levees away from the river to protect new housing that sprung up on tenuously reclaimed land, industrial pollution in the Mississippi River, limited space for garbage disposal, and destruction of the surrounding wetlands would come to bear.
It was elucidating to learn how protection of the city evolved from private citizens, to the city government, and eventually the Federal government, with its matching increase of effectiveness and rising expectations. Also the sheer magnitude of waste dumped directly into the river, both by New Orleans itself and then by manufacturing firms upriver in the 20th century is astounding. The section on the clash between Progressive Era and Jim Crow values and how ultimately environmental inequities and social inequities were entwined was insightful.
The work itself was rather dry at times. It did not address the sizable effect of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet on the surrounding wetlands. And while Colten clearly stated he would not delve deeply into related political and economic issues, the work itself could have been more readable and comprehensive by talking about such local topics as steamboats, the bulk shipping industry, the shrimping industry, or the oil industry.
Where "An Unnatural Metropolis" clearly exceeds another scholarly work on a similar subject, "Catastrophe in the Making", is in its integration of multiple environmental factors to provide a broad understanding of the issues arrayed against the Crescent City. Limited solutions are offered and are not centered on combating a single source, whereas "Catastrophe in the Making" implies that by simply curbing the power of a cabalistic "Growth Machine" and filling in the MRGO, the city will avoid future disasters. Admittedly Colten's book did not have the advantage of hindsight to analyze the Katrina catastrophe, but it also did not have to contend with the distorting, emotionally charged aftermath of Katrina either. Which is likely why his work helps provide a clear understanding of that tragic event.
The book is really three and a half stars for the high quality content, the craftsmanship ultimately dragging this one down.
If you are interested in learning about the history of the Crescent City, this book serves as a good reference. At least from a dark perspective.
A very good book the kin of my French-Canadian ancestors to 1702 old up-river Mobile removed to New Orleans, and later ancestors removed to New Orleans beginning 1805 (when lawyer David Copp, Jr., was murdered in a gambling house). Tradition, from an engineering perspective (floods) and sanitation considerations said New Orleans should never have been built there; economics said otherwise. The engineering perspective is historically confirmed in detail by this book; it also details how the "solutions" keep adding to the problems. The book does not advocate this; but decades ago I'm told London, England, designated a miles-wide "greenbelt" around it, to stop outwards growth. Within the greenbelt it also stopped upwards growth (N.O. has been sinking a long time) by limiting construction. As I understand it; within the greenbelt you can combine and divide structures, stack and unstack it; as long as you own or purchase the surface area building square feet you use. But that's not the American-Way; expand, expand, and let the some other than I, taxpayer, pay for the resulting problems. You don't need to be technical to understand this book.
I highly recommend this book to students, professionals, and engaged citizens who want to understand how the swamp turned into a city. Some reviewers said the book was dry, but I found it to be extremely interesting from introduction to conclusion. I recommend reading this book along with works by Richard Campanella when studying the history of the urban form of New Orleans. Colton and Campanella have very different tones and outlooks for the future, which will help readers formulate a boarder prospective on the environmental and social issues facing New Orleans. Peirce F. Lewis' "New Orleans The Making of an Urban Landscape" is another excellent compliment to Colton's work.
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