What is a City?: Rethinking the Urban Landscape After Hurricane Katrina

What is a City?: Rethinking the Urban Landscape After Hurricane Katrina

What is a City?: Rethinking the Urban Landscape After Hurricane Katrina

Article Type: Book reviews From: Disaster Prevention and Management, Volume 18, Issue 3

Edited by Phil Steinberg and Rob Shields,University of Georgia Press,Athens, GA,www.ugapress.uga.edu2008,233 pp.,ISBN 978-0-8203-2964-2,$64.95 (clothback); $19.95 (paperback)

Is New Orleans a cosmopolitan hub? An insular backwater? An African-American city? A sinking town? This book examines these and other images of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to examine the large questions of what cities are and how they function. The work of 13 writers, academics, and activists combine in this volume to explore issues raised by urban life and a serious hazard like Katrina.

In his essay on Creole urbanism, University of Missouri-Kansas City Urban Planning Professor Jacob Wagner writes, “Rather than attracting us to New Orleans as some exceptional case, the idea of Creole urbanism should send all of us back to our own neighborhoods in search of the forgotten place identities in whatever locations we call home.”