What Is a City?

by Steinberg, Phil; Shields, Rob

• ISBN13: 9780820329642
• ISBN10: 0820329649
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr

Summary

The devastation brought upon New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee system failure has forced urban theorists to revisit the fundamental question of urban geography and planning: What is a city? Is it a place of memory embedded in architecture, a location in regional and global networks, or an arena wherein communities form and reproduce themselves?Planners, architects, policymakers, and geographers from across the political spectrum have weighed in on how best to respond to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina. The thirteen contributors toWhat Is a City?are a diverse group from the disciplines of anthropology, architecture, geography, philosophy, planning, public policy studies, and sociology, as well as community organizing. They believe that these conversations about the fate of New Orleans are animated by assumptions and beliefs about the function of cities in general. They unpack post-Katrina discourse, examining what expert and public responses tell us about current attitudes not just toward New Orleans, but toward cities. As volume coeditor Phil Steinberg points out in his introduction, "Even before the floodwaters had subsided . . . scholars and planners were beginning to reflect on Hurricane Katrina and its disastrous aftermath, and they were beginning to ask bigger questions with implications for cities as a whole."The experience of catastrophe forces us to reconsider not only the material but the abstract and virtual qualities of cities. It requires us to revisit how we think about, plan for, and live in them.

Author Biography

Phil Steinberg is an associate professor of geography at Florida State University. He is the author of The Social Construction of the Ocean and coauthor of Managing the Infosphere. Rob Shields is a Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Departments of Sociology and Art and Design at the University of Alberta. His books include Places on the Margin and Lefebvre, Love and Struggle.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introductions
What Is a City? Katrina's Answers	p. 3
New Orleans' Culture of Resistance	p. 30
Materialities
Introduction	p. 57
"Explicit Ruins: Architecture Is More Visible When It Fails"
On Flexible Urbanism	p. 63
Delta City	p. 78
Mobilities
Introduction	p. 95
Mobility and the Regional Context of Urban Disaster	p. 99
Uneven Mobilities and Urban Theory: The Power of Fast and Slow	p. 112
Memories
Introduction	p. 125
Remembering the Forgetting of New Orleans	p. 129
Repair and the Scaffold of Memory	p. 140
Divisions and Connections
Introduction	p. 155
Repositioning the Theorist in the Lower Ninth Ward	p. 159
Understanding New Orleans: Creole Urbanism	p. 172
On Street Life and Urban Disasters: Lessons from a "Third World" City	p. 186
References	p. 203
Contributors	p. 223
Index	p. 225
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