Hating Bourbon Street
In this excerpt from this 2014 book Bourbon Street: A History (LSU Press), Tulane geographer Richard Campanella explains the curious cultural phenomenon of hating Bourbon Street—who hates it, why they need you to know they hate it, and what they’re missing when they hate it. Courtesy Places Journal. New Orleans: Place Portraits — Over the next…
The Great Footprint Debate, Updated
In the tumultuous aftermath of the 2005 Katrina deluge, New Orleanians debated passionately a fundamental geographical question: should the city close down flood-damaged neighborhoods and shrink its urban “footprint” in the interest of environmental sustainability, or does every citizen have a right to return to their home? Tulane geographer Richard Campanella revisits “the Great Footprint…
Disaster and Response in an Experiment Called New Orleans, 1700s-2000s
Courtesy Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Tulane geographer Richard Campanella analyzes three centuries of disasters in New Orleans—storm, flood, fire, plague, war, among others—and how the city has responded, recovered, and transformed. New Orleans: Place Portraits — Over the next nine months, AAG’s “Focus on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,” will feature a series of articles on…
The Ozone Belt: How St. Tammany Parish Turned Ecological Services into Good Business—but for the Wrong Reasons
For nearly a century, the piney woods across Lake Pontchartrain came to be known as the Ozone Belt—a ‘brand’ that touted the region’s salubrious environs as a summertime alternative to pestilential New Orleans. And it seemed to work, writes Tulane geographer Richard Campanella—but not for the touted reasons. Courtesy The Times-Picayune (PDF). New Orleans: Place…
The Accidental Forest
Sometimes urbanization misses a spot. Join Tulane geographer Richard Campanella in exploring a relict patch of New Orleans once-vast, now-drained backswamp, today an emerald Eden without a name, surrounded by a million people. Courtesy The Times-Picayune (PDF). New Orleans: Place Portraits — Over the next nine months, AAG’s “Focus on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,”…
Beneath New Orleans, a Coastal Barrier Island
Nearly all of New Orleans’s soils were deposited by the Mississippi, but the river itself was guided here in part by a preexisting barrier island formed by the Pearl River. This article by Tulane geographer Richard Campanella, courtesy Louisiana Cultural Vistas, explores the subterranean Pine Island Trend (PDF). New Orleans: Place Portraits — Over the next…
New Orleans Was Once Above Sea Level
Everyone has heard that New Orleans is below sea level; locals joke about it with a mix of dark humor and beleaguered pride, and it affects the region’s flood risk and future sustainability in fundamental ways. Yet few people realize that this condition is anthropogenic in its origins, and for the first 170 years of…
Four Cadastral Fingerprints on the Louisiana Landscape
The Louisiana landscape bears the imprints of four cadastral (land surveying) systems, more than nearly any other state, and they reflect and affect local society in profound ways today. By Tulane geographer Richard Campanella, courtesy Louisiana Cultural Vistas (PDF). New Orleans: Place Portraits — Over the next nine months, AAG’s “Focus on New Orleans and the…
Louisiana Topography: Third Lowest, Third Flattest, and Most Interesting
A look at quirks and idiosyncrasies of topographic flatness in "Louisiana Topography: Third Lowest, Third Flattest, and Most Interesting" by Tulane geographer Richard Campanella, courtesy Louisiana Cultural Vistas (PDF). New Orleans: Place Portraits — Over the next nine months, AAG’s “Focus on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,” will feature a series of articles on New…