Walking to New Orleans

Walking to New Orleans
Author: Robert R. N. Ross
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 607
Release: 2008-09-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1556352247

Two and a half years after the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, New Orleans and south Louisiana continue to struggle in an unsettled gumbo of environmental, social, and rebuilding chaos. Citizens await the fruition of four successive recovery and reconstruction planning processes and the realization of essential infrastructure repairs. Repopulation in Orleans Parish has slowed considerably; the parish remains at best two-thirds of its former size; thousands of former residents who wish to return face barriers of many kinds. Heroic efforts at rebuilding have occurred through the efforts of individual neighborhood associations and voluntary associations who have attempted to address serious losses in affordable housing and health care services. Walking to New Orleans traces how a dominant but paradoxical model of the relation between the human and natural worlds in Western culture has informed many environmental and engineering dilemmas and has contributed to the history of social inequities and injustice that anteceded the disasters of the hurricanes and subsequent flooding. It proposes a model for collaborative recovery that links principles of ethics and engineering, in which citizens become active, ongoing participants in the process of the reconstruction and redesign of their unique locus of habitation. Equally important, it gives voice to the citizens and associations who are desperately working to rebuild their homes and lives both in urban New Orleans and in the villages of coastal Louisiana.

Delta Urbanism: New Orleans

Delta Urbanism: New Orleans
Author: Richard Campanella
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2017-11-08
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1351178016

This volume of APA's Delta Urbanism series traces the development of New Orleans from precolonial times to post-Katrina realities, in the context of the deltaic plain on which it lies. The book describes the underlying physical terrain and covers the various transformations humans have made to it: site selection, settlement, urbanization, population, expansion, drainage, protection, exploitation, devastation, and recovery. What New Orleans has experienced foretells what similar cities will be tackling in years to come.

New Orleans Under Reconstruction

New Orleans Under Reconstruction
Author: Carol M. Reese
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 483
Release: 2014-07-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1781682747

When the levees broke in August 2005 as a result of Hurricane Katrina, 80 percent of the city of New Orleans was flooded, with a loss of 134,000 homes and 986 lives. In particular, the devastation hit the vulnerable communities the hardest: the old, the poor and the African American. The disaster exposed the hideous inequality of the city. In response to the disaster numerous plans, designs and projects were proposed. This bold, challenging and informed book gathers together the variety of responses from politicians, writers, architects and planners and searches for the answers of one of the most important issues of our age: How can we plan for the future, creating a more robust and equal place?

New Orleans Under Reconstruction

New Orleans Under Reconstruction
Author: Michael Sorkin
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2014-05-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1781684316

When the levee system protecting New Orleans failed and was overtopped in August 2005 following the arrival of Hurricane Katrina, 80 percent of the city was flooded, with a loss of 103,000 homes in the metropolitan area. At least 986 Louisiana residents died. The devastation hit vulnerable communities the hardest: the elderly, the poor, and African-Americans. The disaster exposed shocking inequalities in the city. In response, numerous urban plans and myriad architectural projects were proposed. Nearly nine years later, debates about planning and design for recovery, renewal, and resilience continue. This bold, challenging, and informed book gathers together a panorama of responses from writers, architects, planners, historians, and activists-including Mike Davis, Rebecca Solnit, Naomi Klein, Denise Scott Brown, and M. Christine Boyer-and searches for answers to one of the most important questions of our age: How can we plan for the urban future, creating more environmentally sustainable, economically robust, and socially equitable places to live? A 2014 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts supported in part the publication of this book.

Cooperatives in New Orleans

Cooperatives in New Orleans
Author: Anne Gessler
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2020-06-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496827600

Cooperatives have been central to the development of New Orleans. Anne Gessler asserts that local cooperatives have reshaped its built environment by changing where people interact and with whom, helping them collapse social hierarchies and envision new political systems. Gessler tracks many neighborhood cooperatives, spanning from the 1890s to the present, whose alliances with union, consumer, and social justice activists animated successive generations of regional networks and stimulated urban growth in New Orleans. Studying alternative forms of social organization within the city’s multiple integrated spaces, women, people of color, and laborers blended neighborhood-based African, Caribbean, and European communal activism with international cooperative principles to democratize exploitative systems of consumption, production, and exchange. From utopian socialist workers’ unions and Rochdale grocery stores to black liberationist theater collectives and community gardens, these cooperative entities integrated marginalized residents into democratic governance while equally distributing profits among members. Besides economic development, neighborhood cooperatives participated in heady debates over urban land use, applying egalitarian cooperative principles to modernize New Orleans’s crumbling infrastructure, monopolistic food distribution systems, and spotty welfare programs. As Gessler indicates, cooperative activists deployed street-level subsistence tactics to mobilize continual waves of ordinary people seizing control over mainstream economic and political institutions.

Clear as Mud

Clear as Mud
Author: Robert B. Olshansky
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2017-11-08
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1351177990

Planning the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita has been among the greatest urban planning challenges of our time. Since 2005, Robert B. Olshansky and Laurie A. Johnson, urban planners who specialize in disaster planning and recovery, have been working to understand, in real time, the difficult planning decisions in this unusual situation. As both observers of and participants in the difficult process of creating the Unified New Orleans Plan, Olshansky and Johnson bring unparalleled detail and insight to this complex story. The recovery process has been slow and frustrating, in part because New Orleans was so unprepared for the physical challenges of such a disaster, but also because it lacked sufficient planning mechanisms to manage community reconstruction in a viable way. New Orleans has had to rebuild its buildings and institutions, but it has also had to create a community planning structure that is seen as both equitable and effective, while also addressing the concerns and demands of state, federal, nonprofit, and private-sector stakeholders. In documenting how this unprecedented process occurred, Olshansky and Johnson spent years on the ground in New Orleans, interviewing leaders and citizens and abetting the design and execution of the Unified New Orleans Plan. Their insights will help cities across the globe recognize the challenges of rebuilding and recovering after disaster strikes.

Prison Capital

Prison Capital
Author: Lydia Pelot-Hobbs
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2023-10-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469675129

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. This is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020. Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding "crime." However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confinement lawsuits and Angola activists challenging life without parole to grassroots organizers struggling to shrink the New Orleans jail following Hurricane Katrina and LGBTQ youth of color organizing against police sexual violence, grassroots movements stretch us toward new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy. Understanding Louisiana's carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.

U.S. Landscape Ordinances

U.S. Landscape Ordinances
Author: Buck Abbey
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 460
Release: 1998-09-07
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780471292760

State-by-state listings and explanations of municipal landscape ordinances In U.S. Landscape Ordinances, Buck Abbey furnishes landscape architects, planners, land-use attorneys, and students with a much-needed resource. This state-by-state presentation demystifies the complex planning laws and ordinances that determine landscape design parameters for more than 300 American cities. The author highlights sections of each ordinance that pertain to landscape architecture, boils the legalese down to plain English, explains the law's main purpose and regulatory function, and spells out the practical implications from a design perspective. With the help of more than fifty diagrams and drawings that clarify complex spatial concepts, U.S. Landscape Ordinances reviews the entire spectrum of green laws currently on the books, including ordinances that cover: * Parking lots and vehicular use areas * Landscape buffers and screens * Street tree plantings * Open space design * Irrigation * Land clearing and building sites The product of ten years of painstaking research and analysis, U.S. Landscape Ordinances is a unique and invaluable tool for professionals in landscape design and municipal planning. It also offers a deep reservoir of information for students, municipal legislators, community activists, and anyone interested in understanding or developing a community's landscape ordinances.

Race and Education in New Orleans

Race and Education in New Orleans
Author: Walter Stern
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2018-05-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0807169196

Surveying the two centuries that preceded Jim Crow’s demise, Race and Education in New Orleans traces the course of the city’s education system from the colonial period to the start of school desegregation in 1960. This timely historical analysis reveals that public schools in New Orleans both suffered from and maintained the racial stratification that characterized urban areas for much of the twentieth century. Walter C. Stern begins his account with the mid-eighteenth-century kidnapping and enslavement of Marie Justine Sirnir, who eventually secured her freedom and played a major role in the development of free black education in the Crescent City. As Sirnir’s story and legacy illustrate, schools such as the one she envisioned were central to the black antebellum understanding of race, citizenship, and urban development. Black communities fought tirelessly to gain better access to education, which gave rise to new strategies by white civilians and officials who worked to maintain and strengthen the racial status quo, even as they conceded to demands from the black community for expanded educational opportunities. The friction between black and white New Orleanians continued throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, when conflicts over land and resources sharply intensified. Stern argues that the post-Reconstruction reorganization of the city into distinct black and white enclaves marked a new phase in the evolution of racial disparity: segregated schools gave rise to segregated communities, which in turn created structural inequality in housing that impeded desegregation’s capacity to promote racial justice. By taking a long view of the interplay between education, race, and urban change, Stern underscores the fluidity of race as a social construct and the extent to which the Jim Crow system evolved through a dynamic though often improvisational process. A vital and accessible history, Race and Education in New Orleans provides a comprehensive look at the ways the New Orleans school system shaped the city’s racial and urban landscapes.