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Book Review
| A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans. By Ari Kelman. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2003. 296 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $29.95.
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| Ari Kelman has written a compelling account of New Orleans's environmental history. Set in an inhospitable location, the Crescent City offers a superb place to examine a waterfront produced both by human and nonhuman forces. Kelman exposes the "historically contingent, culturally constructed, and material" (p. 13) aspects of the city's riparian public space. Using key episodes in the riverfront's nearly 300-year development, he argues that "public space and nature remain a vital part of urban America, alive if not always well" (p. 8). |
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Kelman's work effectively focuses on the waterfront, not the entire city, to explore human-nature interactions—these encompass the many ways residents have tried to transform the environment to serve commerce and nature's persistent and sometimes capricious role in an urban setting. The batture, or actual river bank, provides a setting for his examination of a vigorous struggle over public access to the dynamic environment. This first episode exposes the keen citizen interest in a contested territory, but also the active geomorphic processes that contributed to the waterfront's morphology and to public policy determining access. Another episode focuses on the terrible Yellow Fever epidemic of 1853. Kelman deftly illustrates how pathogens penetrated the city's built environment and forced civic leaders to recalibrate their view of the waterfront as a commercial zone to a conceptualization of it as part of larger, and deadly, ecological system. Likewise, the 1927 flood finally convinced engineers charged with controlling the river that, at best, they could only work with the gargantuan ecosystem. |
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This book is conceptually sophisticated and a pleasure to read. By shaping his arguments within the growing literature on urban environments and public space, Kelman broadens their effectiveness and appeal. He successfully contends that the dichotomy between nature and culture in the city is invalid, and to his credit, he avoids the shrill tone of many contributors to this theoretical discussion. This is a superb scholarly contribution, although some sections could have been strengthened. Given the work's focus on the waterfront, Kelman allots less that adequate attention to the quarantine issue in the yellow fever chapter. In terms of the waterfront as public space, certain episodes are strained to make that case. The dockworkers' strike as an action to become part of the "public" with access to the waterfront creates unevenness in an otherwise strong argument. Kelman has selected some excellent illustrations, but several would have been more effective if he had enlarged cartographic details and not reproduced entire maps at an unsatisfactory scale. |
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Ari Kelman has produced an outstanding treatise on New Orleans and on urban environmental history. As such it should become a standard work in seminars on the subject. Beyond its immediate academic audience, it will provide those with interests in southern history, Louisiana history, and environmental history in general a highly satisfying read. |
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Reviewed by Craig E. Colten, professor of geography at Louisiana State University. He edited Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change (2000). |
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