The Razing Tide of the Port of New Orleans: Power, Ideology, Economic Growth and the Destruction of Community

Azcona, Brian Lloyd

doi:10.17161/str.1808.5216

Cited by 8 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…In short, powerful business and especially shipping interests appear prone to control the recovery process in St Bernard while 9th Ward residents pursue their long struggle to improve their lot and gain some control over their neighbourhood. There is much continuity in this pattern (see Azcona, 2006, on the historical dom inance of the shipping industry in New Orleans, and Lamphair, 1999, on organising in the 9th Ward).…”

Section: Cynthia Lewis Points Out That the Memorial's Construction Wamentioning

confidence: 98%

Continuity, social change and Katrina

Henry

2010

Disasters

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For some time, disaster researchers have looked for social change and mostly found continuity. This paper argues that shifting the focus from investigating social change to documenting continuity may enhance the understanding and planning of post-disaster situations especially in industrialised societies like the United States. Drawing from qualitative data from post-Katrina New Orleans, it proposes using the concept of continuity as an analytical device both to identify the axes of continuity and evaluate the likelihood and possible dimensions of social change. The analysis of long-term recovery plans, along with field observations and interviews with evacuees, suggest that despite the well-documented emergence of conflict in post-Katrina New Orleans, the likelihood of social change appears limited.

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Section: Cynthia Lewis Points Out That the Memorial's Construction Wamentioning

confidence: 98%

Continuity, social change and Katrina

Henry

2010

Disasters

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“…Between 1957 and 1963, the MRGO was dredged 122 km through the Lake Borgne and Breton Sound estuaries, connecting the Industrial Canal with the Gulf of Mexico (Figure 8). As Figure 9 illustrates, local port clients (Standard Fruit, in this case) hailed the construction of the MRGO as an improvement upon the connectivity offered by the Mississippi River (Azcona, 2006). The MRGO severed the ridgeline formed by Bayou La Loutre, an ancient distributary of the Mississippi, which had historically regulated salinity between the Lake Borgne estuary and the Breton Sound estuary.…”

Section: Enrolling the Lake Borgne Estuary Into "Centroport Usa"mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This simultaneous eastward migration placed thousands of people in flood vulnerable terrain when Hurricane Betsy struck the region in 1965. The storm surge devastated much of St. Bernard Parish and the Ninth Ward of New Orleans (Shallat, 2000;Azcona, 2006). The drainage siphon under the Industrial Canal failed and flowed backwards under tidal pressure, flooding the Florida and Desire projects, along with thousands of other homes on the west side of the Industrial Canal.…”

Section: Enrolling the Lake Borgne Estuary Into "Centroport Usa"mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Once the initial investments in canal infrastructure were made, billions of dollars in additional infrastructural investments followed in the form of flood control systems and ecological restoration measures devised to mitigate the flooding hazards, soil instability, and ecological changes brought on by the canals themselves -a layering and interrelating of the material path dependencies associated both with ecological regimes and infrastructural zones. More and more state capital became bound up in Centroport's infrastructures, despite the fact that by the 1980s it was clearly failing to generate economic returns (Azcona, 2006;Gramling et al 2011). Centroport attracted much less traffic than port officials anticipated, and their limited depths prevented the massive ships being built by the 1980s, from using Centroport.…”

Section: Centroport's Failure and Ecological Legacymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Contesting the coast: Ecosystems as infrastructure in the Mississippi River Delta

Lewis

Ernstson

2019

Progress in Planning

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We develop an analytical repertoire for understanding historical interrelationships between water infrastructure, regional environmental politics, and large-scale coastal ecosystems. In doing so, we scrutinize how notions of urban resilience, climate adaptation, and ecosystem-based infrastructure are influencing contemporary planning practice. Our account from New Orleans and the Mississippi River Delta traces several large-scale hydrological engineering projects with origins in the early 20 th century, which aimed to restructure the landscape for more effective maritime transportation, flood protection, and urban drainage. The account concludes with a discussion of a massive and ongoing planning project, which aims to restore the historical dynamics of the Mississippi River Delta, diverting the river into nearby coastal wetlands to provide storm protection for vulnerable communities, most especially New Orleans. Our analysis shows how the development of water infrastructure systems in the region produced cleavages in the region's body politic and eco-hydrology, generating disputes that threaten to slow or obstruct the plan's implementation. The study shows how the forms and discourses of political contention in the present are deeply informed by past decisions regarding the placement, operation, and maintenance of large-scale water infrastructures in the region. The conflicts that emerge from these cleavages comprise the primary obstacle facing ecosystem-based strategies aimed at securing New Orleans and other major settlements in the region from storm surges. This raises fundamental challenges for planning practice, which are explored here through a discussion of situational dissensus, conflicting rationalities, and pathways for democratic institutional innovation.

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“…These canals were an integral part of the Dock Board's decades-long effort to establish an 'inner harbour' on the eastern side of New Orleans, which ostensibly would provide massive port facilities away from the drastic seasonal depth fluctuations of the Mississippi River. The 'crown jewel' of the inner harbour project, a giant canal shortcut from the GIWW to the Gulf of Mexico eventually dubbed the 'Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MR-GO)', would not be constructed until the 1960s (Freudenberg et al, 2009;Youngman, 2011;Thomas and McCaffrey, 2013; see also Azcona, 2006). 5 The Dock Board's expanded canal system had shifted and worsened the hurricane storm surge flood risk facing New Orleans by the mid-1940s.…”

Section: Wartime Canal Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The development of manufactured flood risk: New Orleans' mid‐century growth machine and the hurricane of 1947

Youngman

2015

Disasters

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Much of the flood risk faced by coastal and riparian populations worldwide is manufactured rather than strictly natural--the outcome of human development projects involving municipal growth machines. This paper details the impacts of the hurricane of September 1947 on New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, and its relationship with the urban development and expansion efforts undertaken during and after the Second World War of 1939-45. New Orleans' newest drainage and shipping canals, which were a major part of its mid-twentieth century development initiative, funnelled the storm surge into the city, a pattern that would repeat itself in subsequent years. Unlike more infamous hurricanes, such as Betsy and Katrina of 1965 and 2005, respectively, the 1947 event is not well-known among disaster researchers. Yet, it provides a fundamental example of how local elites have continuously exacerbated flood risk throughout the city and surrounding area, leaving it simultaneously dependent on and endangered by its embedded system of drainage and shipping canals.

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The Razing Tide of the Port of New Orleans: Power, Ideology, Economic Growth and the Destruction of Community

Cited by 8 publications

References 16 publications

Continuity, social change and Katrina

Continuity, social change and Katrina

Contesting the coast: Ecosystems as infrastructure in the Mississippi River Delta

The development of manufactured flood risk: New Orleans' mid‐century growth machine and the hurricane of 1947

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