| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. By Craig E. Colten. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xviii, 245 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8071-2977-1.)
As an evocative hybrid of environmental history, urban ecology, social struggle, and the emergence of government agencies, Craig E. Colten's An Unnatural Metropolis delivers a rich chronicle of the river city's development. Critical of the typical historical geographer's approach, Colten counters the more traditional analysis of urban geography that privileges economic and power relationships as the primary shapers of the urban fabric. He constructs an intricate history of natural and human systems, both of equal importance, in the development and growth of the region.	1
The French founders were faced with a conundrum when they chose the location of the settlement that was to become New Orleans. Do they opt for the commercial viability and strategic positioning that the mouth of the Mississippi River provides given the inhospitable landscape of swamps, floods, and other physical inadequacies? With questionable foresight, they gambled on the location, and Colten portrays the three-hundred-year (pre–Hurricane Katrina) battle to "wrest" the city from nature.	. . .

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