Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Foreword William M. Taylor and Michael P. Levine--Catastrophe and the “Katrina Effect” Reckoning: Disaster and Justice Naomi Zack--The Effect of Katrina on Ideas About Justice Anna Hartnell--New Orleans, 2005 and Port-au-Prince, 2010: Some Reflections on Trans-American Disaster in the Twenty-first Century Recomposing Katrina John Hannigan--“It’s the end of the city (as we know it)”: Katrina as Metaphor and Template for the “Urban Apocalypse” Richard Campanella--A Katrina Lexicon James O’Byrne--Bearing Witness: Journalists in the Eye of the Storm Dissembling: Sociology, Philosophy and Ecology James Rhodes--Extending the “Urban Disaster” Paradigm: From New Orleans to Detroit (and Beyond?) Michael Levine--Witnessing Katrina: Morbid Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Disaster Accounting for Disaster Grahame Thompson--Post-Katrina and Post-Financial Crises: Competing Logics of Risk, Uncertainty, and Security Michael Faure--Shifts in Compensating Victims of Disasters after Katrina Tabula rasa: Urbanism and Architecture Christine Boyer--Katrina Effect: The Ruination of New Orleans and the Planners of Injustice William M. Taylor--Architecture after Katrina: Lessons from the Past or Designs for Someone Else’s Future? Jeffry Diefendorf--Historic Urban Catastrophes: Learning for the Future from Wartime Destruction Memory: forgetfulness and commemoration Craig Colten--Historic City with a Poor Memory David Simpson--Natural and Man-Made: Memorializing Complex Causes Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

The book is a collection of essays from various authors and critical perspectives exploring the impact of Hurricane Katrina on contemporary discourse; it comprises a series of reflections on a disaster and our urban, social and political futures.

About the Author

William M. Taylor is Winthrop Professor of Architecture at the University of Western Australia, Australia. Michael P. Levine is Winthrop Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Australia, Australia. Oenone Rooksby is a Research Associate at the University of Western Australia and a Graduate Architect at Officer Woods Architects, Australia. Joely-Kym Sobott is a Research Associate at the University of Western Australia, and teaches in the field of Architectural History and Theory.

Reviews

This well curated collection is as timely as it is sobering. It provides an urgently needed look into the fragile networks that hold societies together and that quickly unravel when a debilitated area is hit by calamity. By examining the political, technological, psychosocial, and material components of catastrophic natural events—or tragedy of the sort that climate change is bound to intensify—these essays force us to confront what otherwise staggers the mind. They demand that we be willing and able to think openly and honestly about the whole tangle of vulnerabilities that create the conditions for worst-case disaster scenarios.
*Lawrence Torcello, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA*

The ‘Katrina effect’ describes the process by which the 2005 hurricane that devastated New Orleans became a central point of reference for larger critiques of existing social, political, and economic relations and structures. Katrina, the editors suggest, became shorthand to describe the failure of institutions, leaders, and policies in a variety of contexts and for the reckoning and debates that followed those failures, both in the US and abroad. This excellent collection of 14 essays probes the ‘Katrina effect’ from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Contributions come from an international roster of historians, philosophers, sociologists, architects, urban planners, and journalists. The essays explore the impact of the disaster on New Orleans (the photo essay by local journalist James O'Byrne is especially noteworthy), but they also place the city and hurricane in larger contexts, including discussions of US urban policy, neoliberal economic policies, and the politics of memory. Several authors compare and contrast events in New Orleans with the situation in Port-au-Prince following the 2010 earthquake. The editors provide an excellent introduction. A valuable collection that will be of great interest to scholars in a range fields. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
*CHOICE*