Writing the liquid city: excavating urban ecologies after Katrina

Abstract

Water has long been a repressed aspect of the New Orleans landscape: for much of the city's history, the Mississippi River -New Orleans' raison d'être -has largely been obscured from view. Levees have long artificially controlled not just the Mississippi but the vast network of canals and waterways that carve up the city. Floods are experienced as a traumatic intrusion.

Agency at/of the waterfront in New York City: Vision 2020 and New York 2140

“…This double liquidity comes close here to the 'two types of liquidity' explored by Anna Hartnell in her examination of cultural responses to Hurricane Katrina, which pit Zygmunt Bauman's 'liquid capital' against the liquidity of the 'floodwaters that threaten New Orleans'. 39 But the crucial difference with Hartnell's corpus is that in New York 2140, the different forms of liquidity are working in tandem, illustrating the observation by Deleuze and Guattari that 'striation' produces in turn new 'smooth' spaces, which it 'disgorges' ('dégorger') in order to draw on new resources; striation needs a commons in order to enclose it and capitalize upon it. 40 The final part of the novel is entitled 'the comedy of the commons' (535 ff.)…”