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An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans From Nature
Craig E. Colten
Louisiana State University Press
November 2004
245 pages
ISBN: 0807129771
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi
River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was
from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called
an "impossible but inevitable city." How New Orleans came
to be, taking shape between the mutual and often
contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is
the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis. Though all cities
must contend with their physical settings, Craig E. Colten
demonstrates that New Orleans may be the city most
dependent on human-induced transformations of its
precarious site.
Colten traces engineered modifications to New Orleans’s
natural environment from 1800 to 2000. Before the city
could swell in size and commercial importance as its
nineteenth-century boosters envisioned, builders had to
wrest it from its waterlogged site, protect it from floods,
expel disease, and supply basic services using local
resources. Colten shows how every manipulation of the
environment made an impact on the city’s social geography
as well—often with unequal, adverse consequences for
minorities—and how each still requires maintenance and
improvement today. For example, while the massive levee
system has controlled the unpredictable Mississippi, it
also captures heavy downpours, creating a new set of
internal flood problems. Recent federal regulations and
environmental activism have converted the river from a
sewage carrier to a protected water supply, reclassified
garbage dumps as hazardous waste sites, and attempted to
restore some of the city’s swamps—but with difficult social
and political adjustments. Urban geographers frequently have portrayed cities as the
antithesis of nature, but in An Unnatural Metropolis Colten
inserts a critical environmental perspective to the history
of urban areas. His amply illustrated work offers an in-
depth look at a city and society uniquely shaped by the
natural forces it has sought to harness.
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