Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans: Discursive spaces of safety and resulting environmental injustice

Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans: Discursive spaces of safety and resulting environmental injustice

infrastructure, Hurrican Katrina, New Orleans, levees, flooding, environmental justice, hurricane, urban, mitigation, natural hazards, disaster

On August 29, 2005, a large tropical cyclone, named Hurricane Katrina, made landfall on the Gulf Coast of the United States. Despite following a track that mostly missed New Orleans, Katrina drowned this city by causing the failure of a protective levee infrastructure that surrounded population portions of the metropolitan area. In this majority African-American city, with a large number of impoverished people, Katrina caused over 900 deaths, tens of thousands of injuries, and left hundreds of thousands of residents displaced. However, the injustices of Katrina can be traced to the founding of New Orleans in 1718, when various government entities worked to alter the city's hazardous natural environment to promote development, beginning with French prison labor in the colony's earliest days, maintaining through a period of Spanish rule, and continuing to contemporary times under the administration of the United States. Indeed, the various infrastructural improvements serve as a discourse of safety, promoting capitalist development and residential settlement of a risky place. By the time Katrina struck, most of these residents, who took these discourses of safety very seriously, were generally of socioeconomically oppressed classes and least able to endure the consequences of that discourse's broken promise.

Shears, Andrew B.

Kent State University

2011

Tyner, James. Advisor

en

Dissertation

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1311009183

http://lallier.msh-vdl.fr/theses/items/show/1090

http://lallier.msh-vdl.fr/theses/archive/files/0296f28f0eca8a622ba24e78100aa36f.jpg