Then there is the building that graces the front cover of this, the last issue of Technology and Culture to originate from Detroit: the beautiful and desolate shell of the abandoned Michigan Central Station. It rises eighteen stories above Roosevelt Park, next to Corktown, the city’s oldest neighborhood. To its front are Michigan Avenue—the old Chicago Road—and two interstate highways, I-96 and the long concrete line of I-75, which runs from Lake Superior to Miami. Behind it lie Ontario, the Detroit River, and the Ambassador Bridge, which with the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel carries the traffic of the busiest commercial border crossing in the world. It isn’t easy to approach the city’s center from the east, south, or west without using one of these routes, and the nearest building more than fifty feet tall is a quarter-mile away, so the station stands out. The sight is a shock to the first-time visitor, and can catch a local unawares.

A likely place to contemplate both the building and the shock is Slows Bar-B-Q on Michigan, sometime haunt of the T&C editorial team, the city’s best barbeque. It opened seven or eight years ago, not long after the Detroit Tigers abandoned their historic ballpark nearby: part restaurant, part “third place,” part arts collective, part civics project, a testimonial to the power of unconventional thinking. A different perspective can be found on the other side of the station, in the general area of 17th and Howard. From that corner on a summer night the Ambassador Bridge sparkles, and the line of semis idling at customs stretches out of sight. To the right the Michigan Central seems even bigger and emptier than it does in the daytime, its windows as dark as deep space. The occasional wiseass suggests lighting it up like Rome does with the Coliseum.

It is really two buildings, a depot and the tower, which housed the railroad’s offices. The Michigan Central was an independent subsidiary of the New York Central, and the station was designed by the same architectural firms responsible for New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, at about the same time and in the same Beaux Arts style, with soaring ceilings, sumptuous marble and crystal, gleaming wood and polished tile. The grand entrance, facing the park, led into a magnificent waiting room modeled, like the rest of the interiors, on a Roman bath. But the intended main entrance was on the east side of the building, the side facing downtown two miles away, where there was a loop for streetcars and the electric railways that fanned out through southeastern Michigan. It opened the day after Christmas, 1913, nine days early because of a fire at the old depot—and ten days, in one of those coincidences, before Henry Ford announced the five-dollar day. In 1914 Ford would build more than a quarter-million Model Ts.

The station saw hundreds of trains a day during the First World War, as the city burgeoned, but in the 1930s the regional electric railways failed. The big trunk lines boomed during the Second World War and for a little while after, but then came the interstates and intercity air travel. In the 1950s the New York Central tried to sell the building for peanuts, and couldn’t. In 1967, fateful year of riot and war, the waiting room was closed. From there the angle of decay grew steeper. In 1971 Amtrak picked the station out of the wreckage of the failed merger of the New York Central and the Pennsylvania and limped it along to serve a few trains a day until 1988, when it closed entirely. Since then it has been part of the backdrop for a running satire of transportation policy and even self-government. The most recent, desperate idea is to rehabilitate the building and use it to house an office of the Department of Homeland Security. In short, it tracks Detroit’s rise and fall with an eccentric faithfulness, throwing back echoes of technological, social, and cultural changes that punctuated the last century.

The Michigan Central Station in winter.

Any building that stands empty for long is eventually a playground for delinquents and arsonists, a canvas for graffiti taggers, a shelter for vagrants and the homeless, a magnet for artists and other melancholy types. But the Michigan Central is a singular ruin in a city that epitomizes decline. And so it has become not just another trashed building for planners and developers and cops to think about but a stop for drive-by journalists and an ideal subject for what is sometimes called ruins porn, a genre that needed digital photography and the internet to flower and that thrives in the formerly industrial American Midwest.1 The attention is not always welcome. Detroit is a byword for capitalism’s supposedly creative destruction among those who celebrate it and those who decry it. Both seem content to leave the city to its own fate, confident that they do not share it. The BBC and PBS, Harper’s and the New York Times visit as tour guides for people who mostly see the place as exotic and regard its not-so-slow disintegration with the same kind of attention as they would a mine accident or an earthquake. Time titled a running feature “Notown.”

But the gawking documentaries and complacent stories and voyeuristic photos eventually do convey some part of the profound uneasiness of Detroit, which settles over nothing more deeply than the abandoned train station. It is ironic that in the Motor City the single thing that most eloquently symbolizes the decline of a technological system, and the whole culture in which it thrived, has far less to do with cars than with what cars displaced— doubly so now that the city is putting its hopes for the future partly in transit, after decades of contemptuously ignoring it. Regardless of that, the automobile is still what principally occupies our thoughts and our plans, not only in Detroit but in Washington and Berlin and Tokyo and Beijing and Delhi. A second billion cars already exist in the mind’s eye of auto manufacturers and oil industry executives and policy makers on four continents. What that will most likely mean really ought to be clear enough. We do not lack the information we need to anticipate the future more accurately, more prudently, more humanely than those who set Detroit on its course did. It remains to be seen if we lack the imagination.

1. Not to lump the good with the bad: Two websites well worth the time are buildingsofdetroit.com and “The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit” at www.detroityes.com. On the bad, with attitude, see Thomas Morton, “Something, Something, Something, Detroit,” at www.viceland.com (vulgarity alert).

Joe Schultz, a native Detroiter, was T&C’s managing editor for the first dozen years the editorial offices were located at the Henry Ford Museum and has been an associate editor since. He works for the International Council on Clean Transportation in Washington, D.C.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Hence the welcome arrival of Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008, pp. viii+351, $47). This collection of essays, edited by Mikael Hård and Thomas J. Misa, covers essentially the last 150 years, when the impact of technology on cities has been manifest most conspicuously in the form of networked utilities and of districts or even whole cities primarily given over to heavy manufacturing or to research. The spatial scope is heavily concentrated on northwest and central Europe; the British Isles and Mediterranean Europe appear as references, not as primary subjects. Airports, canals and ports, and railroads, which connected and served cities but had a major impact on regional and rural landscapes, do not figure in this book either. The usual caveats about collective works apply.

The question, then, is whether the strengths are of larger interest. There are two heuristic and interpretive issues at the heart of this book. The first has to do with the diffusion of technologies in specific urban contexts when these reflect different historical, institutional, social, and cultural settings. The question of diffusion is an old one. Are the editors on solid ground when they assert that “the nations of Europe are more similar today than they have ever been” (p. 5)? Nations? Or cities? Nations in the form of nation-states, e.g., since about 1848 or 1919? What about empires, either the Roman, Christian, or Napoleonic? And what generates homogeneity? If it is urban technology, the Romans come first; if it is about concepts of fit spatial design and governance, then we need to look at the high-water mark of the Enlightenment. Hård and Misa are right to state that “A crucial question remains whether we have ‘room for maneuver’ in the face of these homogenizing and universalizing pressures” (p. 4). But if this is a concern of the editors and the authors, it is a concern they do little to address explicitly.

The second issue has to do with the transforming impact of large-scale technologies over time, and specifically the question of whether the technological transformation of European cities has made these cities, and indeed even nations, more similar, more homogeneous. Europe is the world’s densest urban civilization: in no other region of the world are there so many cities so near each other. The shape and structure of cities help to define their identity. This is no trivial matter in a political culture such as Europe’s, where the municipality extends back to the Middle Ages and antedates the dominant political structures of today. To the extent that technological choices affect not only how cities function but how they are appropriated by citizens to help them define their identity, policies and public and private investment that are applied to cities are, deservedly, the subject of politics. Fortunately many of Hård and Misa’s authors, echoing the importance of urban politics to the very essence of European cities, have addressed this question.

To this reader, however, the interest in urban politics has been shaped too much and too often by postmodernist concerns about discourse, about how cultural ideas and values are formed and diffused, and not enough by hard facts about whose money is being spent, on whose behalf, and for what purposes. Postmodernist terminology that matters so much in academic discourse is largely irrelevant when a city council is voting, when editorials are drafted and petitions signed. Historians are in danger of imposing conceptual frameworks on the grounds that people—actors, if you will—are unconscious of what they are really doing. This has to be kept in mind when reading about the impulse to adopt modernity through technology, whether for its symbolic or political value, or simply to help solve basic urban management problems. Contributions such as coeditor Hård’s and Marcus Stippak’s on “The German City in Britain and the United States,” and Martina Hessler’s on science in the city, looking at university and research towns, are rich enough empirically to transcend the otherwise-obligatory use of academic phraseology.

So what do we find in this book? Chapters on port competition on the Rhine by Cornelis Disco and on individual cities as different as Istanbul, Kraków, and Budapest by Noyan Dinçkal, Dagmara Jajesniak-Quast, and Pál Germuska, respectively; and on urban phenomena such as European cities of consumption by Paolo Capuzzo, Hessler’s piece on “Science in the City: European Traditions and American Models,” and Per Lundin’s “Mediators of Modernity: Planning Experts and the Making of the ‘Car-Friendly’ City in Europe.” There are chapters on technology and streets in the Netherlands by Hans Buiter, on gas and electricity networks by Dieter Schott, and on the modernist style of architecture and planning, with links to environmentalism, by coeditor Misa, Per Lundin, and Andrew Jamison.

Clearly, ideas flowed, engineers and planners traveled, information crossed borders. But what about that most liquid and symbolic of artifacts, money? How can one write about post-1919 central Europe, or post-1947 eastern Europe, without an economic frame of reference? How can we treat the era from the 1880s to this decade without recognizing the enormous difference between the economic views of the future that people had before 1914 and after 1918? One finds scarcely a reference to bonds and loans, taxes, regulated pricing, and profit margins. This is a gap which suggests a collective blind spot. Labor practices and the costs of materials in long economic cycles matter vitally to the investment in and maintenance of urban technologies. An exception in this book is Schott’s contribution on utility networks for gas and electricity.
Urban Machinery remains, on reflection, a rich collection, and Americanists in particular—who are less likely to be familiar with historical examples from within Europe or of the patterns of diffusion between Europe and North America—will benefit from close attention to a number of the contributions which make explicit comparisons and bring material to light about the movement of practitioners and of practices in both directions across the Atlantic. The barriers to diffusion are not overlooked, either: Misa, for example, asks why the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) and modernism did not penetrate the United States.

This book appears at a turning point. Green technology, especially in Asia and Europe, and policies to respond to global climate change, will have a dramatic impact on housing, transport, and urban form, and on the productive and distributional functions for which cities remain the platform. The solutions—technological, political, cultural—will test innovation as an urban activity. The trend toward homogenization which is a thread linking the chapters in this collective work may have reached its high-water mark. Given environmental constraints and the imperative to adapt solutions to local circumstances, the next phase of urban technological development will accentuate diversity.

After two decades on the history faculty of Michigan State University, Josef Konvitz joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, where he is now the head of division, Regulatory Policy. This review is written on his personal responsibility.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Now, John Rennie Short, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, has revisited and updated Gottmann’s original Megalopolis formulation in his elegant and thought-provoking book Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast (Resources for the Future Press, 2007, $70/$28.95). Short explains the metaphor behind his book as follows:

Metropolitan growth has a liquid quality; it is constantly moving over the landscape, here in torrents, there in rivulets, elsewhere in steady drips. . . . Metropolitan growth possesses an unstable quality that flows over political boundaries, seeps across borders, and transcends tight spatial demarcations; it is a process, not a culmination, always in motion, never at rest (pp. 14–15).

In such felicitous prose, Short emulates Gottmann’s own tendency to embellish dry statistical analysis with flights of rhetoric, as in the latter’s rather grandiloquent description of Megalopolis as “a stupendous monument erected by titanic efforts” whose fortunate inhabitants he deems to be “the richest, best educated, best housed, and best serviced in the world.” Gottmann supported his assertions with nearly 800 pages on settlement history, economic geography, demography, land use, and related topics. But despite his blizzard of statistics, Gottmann begged at least two questions: By what criteria was the geographic area of Megalopolis defined, and why is Megalopolis significant as a region, as distinct from the principal city-regions that it contains?

Short candidly admits that Gottmann’s original definition of Megalopolis was “neither consistent nor clear” and provided “no consistent demarcation or empirical base to build upon” (pp. 9–10). Nevertheless, Short gives it a try. Admitting to an element of subjectivity in his own selection process, Short drops a few of Gottmann’s peripheral counties and adds several others, yielding a new map of Megalopolis that includes 124 counties in 12 states with a population of 48.7 million (as compared with 31.9 million in Gottmann’s original study area).

Appropriately, the question begged by Gottmann is explicitly raised by Short: “Having defined the region, what does it mean? In what sense is Megalopolis a region?” But to confront that question is not necessarily to answer it. Like Gottmann, Short resorts to assembling a vast array of spatial data ranging across demography, employment, housing, crime, farming, bank deposits, and other variables tabulated by the census. These data are not explicitly set forth in Liquid City but are posted as an online “Electronic Atlas of Megalopolis” (http://www.umbc.edu/ges/student_ projects/digital_atlas/index.htm [accessed 25 August 2009]) containing sixty maps of social and economic data for the counties in the updated list. (The atlas was compiled in collaboration with Thomas D. Rabenhorst and UMBC geography students. I found it graphically inviting but a bit random in the selection of variables included.) The remainder of the book draws extensively on selected subsets of these variables to attempt to define what Megalopolis means today.

Short provides a much more nuanced analysis than Gottmann of the demography and economy of Megalopolis. For example, Gottmann dismissed race and poverty with cavalier disdain, observing that Megalopolis “attracts large numbers of in-migrants from the poorer sections . . . especially Southern Negroes and Puerto Ricans, who congregate in the old urban areas and often live in slums.” By contrast, Short compares available census data on race and ethnicity, finding not surprisingly that the white population of central cities within Megalopolis declined from 83 percent in 1960 to 42 percent in 2000, while suburbs, or at least some of them, have gradually become more ethnically diverse since 1960. The white-black dichotomy of Gottmann’s era has now been supplanted by a more complex mosaic of whites, blacks, Hispanics (white or black), and Asians. Foreign-born immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America account for most of the population growth of Megalopolis since 1950.

“Suburbs” of course are no longer the monolithic middle-class white enclaves of “organization men” and their families as documented by William H. Whyte in his classic 1956 study of postwar suburbia, The Organization Man (republished by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2002). “Suburbs” (not a census category) now encompass older inner-ring bedroom communities, impoverished former industrial enclaves, “edge cities,” upscale gated communities, and, on the metropolitan fringe, residual farm villages and rural areas. Short devotes several chapters to examining the changing economies, land use, and demographics outside the central cities of Megalopolis.

Predictably, “decentralization” is identified as the fundamental trend in Megalopolis, in large part oriented to the network of interstate and other limited-access highways which have facilitated urban sprawl and the abandonment of older central city neighborhoods since the 1960s. Another important driver of decentralization is the loss of manufacturing to lower-cost regions of the United States and abroad, with the concomitant decline of industrial and port cities within Megalopolis like Worcester, Camden, Baltimore, and Portland. Suburban office parks and the “edge cities” of Megalopolis and elsewhere reflected the rise of spatially diffuse service industries, such as finance, health, travel, and marketing. With the advent of the internet, those industries are also spreading away from Megalopolis to low-wage urban centers around the world.

Short strives to characterize the “liquid landscape” of Megalopolis through several forms of analysis conducted at different geographic scales. He develops a typology of county units based on their relative affluence and demographic diversity (using “foreign born” as a measure of the latter). A subsequent chapter addresses a finer scale of “urban places” which Short estimates to number 2,353 within Megalopolis, grouping several census categories. This set of places is subject to a withering array of 39 variables employing standard statistical techniques. For good measure, a brief chapter focuses on selected census tracts to represent the variation among “urban neighborhoods” within the Megalopolis cities of Washington, Boston, and Baltimore. The bottom line resulting from these various levels of analysis seems to be that Megalopolis may be more heterogeneous than homogeneous—that its internal diversity overwhelms any sense of unity as a region. I shall return to this matter before concluding.

Turning from the micro to the macro, Short considers the status of today’s Megalopolis in the global context. The preeminence of New York City in world finance and of Washington, D.C., in international relations needs no elaboration. To extrapolate the importance of those cities and their respective metropolitan hinterlands to Megalopolis writ large requires a rhetorical leap of faith, e.g., Gottmann’s famous declaration that Megalopolis is “the Continent’s Economic Hinge.” Short fairly admits that today “The region neither dominates the national economy nor shapes the national identity to the extent that it did in 1950” (p. 23). Late in the book, however, he succumbs to Gottmannesque oratory: “Megalopolis is the world’s most important GCR [global city region] where the different processes of globalization are readily apparent” (p. 141).

This still begs the question that Gottmann himself never addressed: What lends significance to the megaregion as such, as distinct from the important cities that it contains? Specifically, what is so “readily apparent” that makes Megalopolis—as distinct from its principal cities—“the world’s most important GCR”? Apart from those central cities and their respective satellite edge cities and bedroom communities, what is left is a motley assortment of counties in various stages of economic boom or bust (mostly the latter in 2010). Is the whole more (or less) than the sum of its parts?

“Megalopolis” thus remains a semantic and graphic construct, more statistically refined by Short than by Gottmann, but nevertheless enigmatic in its exact extent and significance. As Short admits, Megalopolis is a vast collection of political units that have little in common or concern for each other. There is no Megalopolis government nor is it the perceived “home place” for its 48.7 million inhabitants, most of whom have probably never heard of it. It is fragmented physically by watersheds and mountain ranges, by economic divides between rich and poor and those in between, by cultural divides among sports loyalties, newspaper circulation, political ideologies, religious roots, vernacular cuisine, and so on. Its internal differences seem to outweigh whatever binds it into a single entity. Can Megalopolis, despite its reduced national importance, still be “the world’s most important global city region?” Or is it a geographical fiction and outworn cliché?

Personally, as a disciple of Gottmann myself, I will cling to the terminology and mental map of Megalopolis as a convenient reference to my own home region. And the alliterative resonance makes it a pleasant term to drop in a dinner conversation—unlike “global city region”! John Rennie Short has done a masterful job of revisualizing and documenting how Megalopolis has changed since Gottmann, and I am grateful to him for revisiting this elusive but enduring geographical proposition.

Rutherford H. Platt is emeritus professor of geography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

More unsettling, though, was my publisher’s request to produce a new “post-Katrina” preface to my book. Ideally, she said, it should be in the sort of journalistic prose style that I use for my more popular writing. With New Orleans still under water, I quickly said yes, not really thinking through the implications. What resulted was an odd document, a hybrid between a short-form magazine essay and an introduction to a scholar’s book. I did my best. But I now realize that I came up wanting in important ways. What I created, I think, was far more a historical document, a chronicle of my views of unfolding news, than good history. I was stricken by reports coming out of New Orleans. I could not step back. Worse still, I was too naive to realize how caught up I was in the moment. I should have done what historians do when they don’t have ready answers for hard questions: read history.

In the aftermath of that experience, Technology and Culture kindly offered me the chance to write a review essay about the literature on urban disasters. What follows is my effort to do that. I have not tried to be comprehensive. Instead, I have chosen five books that I think might help readers understand Katrina: John McPhee’s Control of Nature, Craig Colten’s Unnatural Metropolis, Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear, Philip Fradkin’s The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906, and Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella’s Resilient City.{1} Writing this essay has certainly allowed me to organize my own thinking on the subject. Unfortunately, I cannot go back and rewrite the preface to my book, which will have to stand on its own merits. What I can do is suggest how these books, read in concert, suggest precedents for the Katrina debacle, even for the leveling of great cities. Each documents an overreliance on technology, a belief in artifice’s ability to tame nature. This deep faith, no matter how misplaced, has permeated American history. And the consequences have been severe, with the bill yet again coming due in New Orleans. On the one hand, I find these authors’ insights somewhat hopeful; I am sustained by the idea that history can help us to grapple with seemingly incomprehensible events. But I cannot help but wonder how it is that we seem to have learned so little from our past.

New Orleans used to be a sort of American Amsterdam: romantic, architecturally alluring, and entirely dependent on flood-control technologies for its survival. Much of the city, as we learned during Hurricane Katrina, lies below sea level. A ring of artificial levees, likely now the nation’s most notorious public works, is the only thing keeping the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain from flowing downhill into it. This technological fix, even when it works, brings its own problems to a place that has a high water table and no natural drainage. Because of the levees’ growth through the years, it has become ever harder to get water out of New Orleans once it finds its way in. Every drop of rain must be pumped over the embankments. And so the city relies on even more technology: hundreds of miles of drainage canals and a network of huge pumps, a system designed to shunt excess water to the levees and then push it over the top. All of this artifice makes New Orleans one of the world’s most engineered landscapes, a remarkable example of human confidence that it is possible to “control nature.”

That pithy phrase belongs, of course, to John McPhee. The first of McPhee’s case studies in his 1989 collection The Control of Nature, “Atchafalaya,” is about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ battle to keep the Mississippi River from leaving its current channel for another route to the sea—a potential death blow for New Orleans, which would become a river city without its river.{2} McPhee notes that “for the Mississippi to make such a shift was completely natural” (p. 6). But nature could not be allowed to run its course in this case, because “in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature” (p. 6). More succinctly, McPhee concludes that “nature, in this place, had become an enemy of the state” (p. 7). And so the state brought its vast resources to bear on the problem, building a structure that has kept the Mississippi flowing past New Orleans for nearly two decades since McPhee’s essay first appeared in the New Yorker. {3} This span is long beyond what the river would have wrought if left to its own designs. And thus we are left with a tragic irony: for McPhee, it seemed that the greatest threat facing New Orleans in the future was going to be too little water. Oops.

McPhee got that one wrong. But forgive him, because he was right and prescient about so many other things, particularly the politics of technology, the way in which applying artifice to complicated environmental dilemmas creates winners and losers, not to mention unintended consequences. He was equally right about the deep hubris (which some would call the real threat facing New Orleans) necessary to think it possible to domesticate something so wild as the Mississippi. In “Atchafalaya,” McPhee, as he always does, takes his readers on an extraordinary journey: up and down the lower Mississippi with Corps of Engineers officers, a crawfisherman, scholars, and environmental activists, characters almost too colorful to be true. It is a bumpy ride, because everyone wants something different from the river: high water or low, more saltwater incursion or less, some flooding or none at all. There are even some heretics who claim that controlling the river is, at best, a short-term proposition. McPhee clearly sympathizes. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Corps of Engineers show a kind of blank certitude about their mission. One general blusters: “The Corps of Engineers can make the Mississippi River go anywhere the Corps directs it to go” (p. 50). In the end, though, readers know that any victory against the river, and by extension against nature more broadly, will be fleeting. Nature always bats last. Or, as a river pilot puts it, “Nature has more time than we do” (p. 24). The book’s title, then, is suffused with irony. The control of nature is a costly illusion.

Craig Colten agrees. In An Unnatural Metropolis: Wrestling New Orleans from Nature, he explores the city’s tortuous efforts to keep unwanted water out and reclaim the local wetlands, as well as other examples of the place trying to engineer itself out of harm’s way.{4} A renowned historical geographer and environmental historian, Colten acknowledges that this process has been driven by culture, politics, and economics. That said, he is an unashamed materialist, far more interested in what he calls the “environmental circumstances that city builders faced” (p. 5) in New Orleans than in anything else. For anyone interested in how New Orleans found itself under water for much of the fall of 2005, this book is essential.

Indeed, in the wake of Katrina it is hard not to approach An Unnatural Metropolis teleologically, as if Colten somehow knew that swaths of New Orleans would be destroyed the year his book appeared in print. Reading the past backward carries all manner of risks, not least presentism. Even worse is the tendency to miss small increments of change over time, subtleties that, better understood, might have recast our understanding of events. Assuming inevitability is both less elegant—we have no term of art for this mistake—and more damaging, as it leaves no room for contingency, the gold standard of current academic nuance. An Unnatural Metropolis is filled with small decisions made at the local level and based on inchoate reasoning or flawed logic, decisions that eventually made New Orleans more rather than less vulnerable. It is filled, in other words, with historical contingency along the road to disaster.

Colten begins with flood control. This is a sensible place to start, because without levees there could be no New Orleans. Actually, without commerce there would be no levees and therefore no New Orleans. The city is a product of imperial ambitions, dreams predicated on the notion that nature can be mastered. French, Spanish, and then American settlers, all entranced by booster myths, viewed the landscape of the Mississippi Valley and decided a city would thrive near the mouth of the continent’s greatest river system. The city would be a metropolitan entrepôt, poised to gather up the produce of a huge hinterland. Where New Orleans now sits, on relatively high ground blessed with connections to Lake Pontchartrain, seemed a more likely location for such an urban project than others in the area. That the place was a bit of a fixer-upper, in need of massive technological interventions to keep it going, was deemed a reasonable tradeoff. After all, the people living there would get rich. They could use some of their profits to tame the local environs, which otherwise would be chaos unbound. Colten subscribes to arguments made decades ago by Peirce Lewis, who called New Orleans “impossible but inevitable”—talk about pith.{5} And so it was that New Orleanians began building levees and trying to drain their city, becoming ever more reliant on technology to keep them safe and nature at bay.

An Unnatural Metropolis next features a chapter on regulating the urban environs, which is framed in terms of “nuisance” abatement: trash and sewage disposal, the quest for potable water, the location of cemeteries, and park planning (pp. 49–50). Again and again, the city pushed its nuisance landscapes away from the urban core. Municipal authorities never seemed to learn that they could not hide from their own filth. What was out of sight and mind one moment kept reappearing the next: rotting trash carried downstream on the river’s current, corpses uncovered by hard rain, yet another eyesore or hazard to be cast farther beyond the pale. At the same time, as with drainage, inadequate municipal financing made real reform difficult. Although this material is fascinating, it demonstrates how current events, far beyond any author’s control, can alter the reception of a book. Following Katrina, most readers, save for specialists, likely will view this chapter as little more than a bridge to the next two, fine-grained inquiries into questions of race, environmental inequalities, and urban space.

In a post-Katrina literary landscape, Colten really hits his stride in chapters 3 and 4, detailing the ways in which the poor and people of color, most often African Americans, typically occupied the lowest, worst-drained, and most-polluted land in New Orleans. For anyone paying attention to the Katrina debacle, this is not news. Colten, though, offers important historical context, noting that this turn of events coincided first with the era of Jim Crow and later with postwar white flight to suburbs made possible as drainage technologies finally improved. Here and elsewhere, Colten is leery of mistaking correlation for causation. He has no hard proof, no smoking gun indicating that white New Orleanians forced African Americans to occupy the low ground and then chose not to extend the city’s drainage apparatus to areas where black people lived. So he is extremely careful with his prose. For instance: “The lapse in sewer service to this low-lying, largely African-American district suggests that a Jim Crow mentality perhaps continued to prevent full engineering efficiency” (p. 97). Absent clear evidence, this is all that Colten offers, a passage typical of the book’s tone: measured and thoughtful, if not always as impassioned as readers shocked by images of Katrina might like.

Colten concludes his book first with threats and then whimsy. As New Orleans expanded, new flood dangers emerged, in part because the illusion that nature was under control had become so convincing. With the massive levees separating the city from the river and lake, and with the urban wetlands reclaimed, New Orleanians could forget the danger they faced. They had to scale the levee to catch a glimpse of the Mississippi; even now, the river roils its way to the Gulf of Mexico largely hidden from view. Stunned tourists in the French Quarter sometimes gazed up from their coffee and beignets in astonishment as a containership glided by, high above street level. But the danger was still there. Colten suggests that New Orleans became dependent on “structural methods” as other cities began embracing “land-use approaches to flood control” (p. 160). While other better-planned cities were starting to work with nature, New Orleans was still trying to control it. The results were predictably bad. For places like the Ninth Ward, a downpour usually meant flooding. And, Colten adds with eerie prescience, a serious hurricane could spell disaster for the lowest-lying areas of the city.

A final chapter details the halfhearted efforts to reintroduce wetlands in recent years. Born of a cultural climate in which to many New Orleanians nature no longer seemed a frontier awaiting conquest, these efforts nonetheless bemuse or frustrate Colten. New Orleans, once a city of swamps, had by the 1960s become a place whose only wetlands could be found on exhibit at the zoo. Additional preserves on the city’s boundaries also disappoint. They represent nature cleansed of its rough edges—hardly nature at all, but instead another tableau of progress in a city convinced that it controls its once-wild environs. The warnings that follow are haunting now, particularly when Colten takes off the gloves in his epilogue. Having drained the wetlands that used to provide reservoirs during floods, New Orleans had put itself in peril. In the event of a severe hurricane, “the city could find itself under water for months. Evacuation would face serious bottlenecks due to the limited number of escape routes across the water-logged terrain.” More chilling: “federal authorities might not be willing to make the investment necessary to save a city that cannot afford to save itself” (p. 191).

No matter how down on its luck the Crescent City may now be, compared to Mike Davis’s vision of Los Angeles, New Orleans remains the city that care forgot. For Davis, L.A.’s glass is not just half-empty, it has long since been shattered in an unfair bar fight and its shards used to wound some poor, unsuspecting passerby. Actually, it is not a glass at all, but a panoptic cylinder, manufactured by an oppressed proletariat and later deployed by urban elites to contain their city’s working classes. Or something like that. Kidding aside, Davis’s Ecology of Fear is an unrelenting neo-Marxist exposé, a polemic that might leave readers afraid to visit Los Angeles for fear of fires, mudslides, earthquakes, killer cougars, poisonous snakes, and flaming bunnies. (Seriously. If Davis is to be believed, the place is absolutely overrun by rabbits on fire.) Oh, and please don’t forget the tornadoes, which are more common in L.A. than in Oklahoma City—at least they are if one accepts Davis’s rather controversial statistics. Wide-ranging, funny, extraordinarily well-written, Ecology of Fear is a crazy quilt. It is often overstated, and tendentious in places. But it is also instructive. And once again, in the aftermath of Katrina, it has a new resonance and feels more timely than ever. Indeed, Davis predicted the carnage that the nation witnessed in New Orleans after the hurricane. He just thought that it would be another city, Los Angeles, that would be destroyed.

Beyond the critique of the way Davis treats evidence—as a rather more plastic substance than many scholars would like—the most damning thing that can be said about Ecology of Fear might also be the book’s greatest virtue: it is as scattered, fragmented, far-reaching, and diverse as Los Angeles itself. Chapters cover the city’s infamous disregard for public space, Southern California’s misunderstood and apparently deadly twisters, and mountain lions hunting humans along the edge-habitats that have been created by the city’s endless sprawl. Another chapter juxtaposes Malibu’s chaparral wildfire cycle with tenement blazes in the heart of downtown L.A., and another conducts a foray into literary studies to examine fictional accounts of Los Angeles’s demise. Finally, there is material that may or may not be about the Los Angeles riots (honestly, having read the book at least ten times, I’m still not entirely sure).

All of that said, Ecology of Fear’s fascinating thesis can be found in its fast-paced first chapter, “The Dialectic of Ordinary Disaster.” It is here that Davis makes his case that Los Angeles is a fraud—not a slice of paradise, blessed with endless summers and miles of lovely beaches, but a disaster just waiting to happen. In fact, calamity in LA is the norm rather than the exception. Even if the city’s elites have papered over this ugly truth with sunny propaganda, Davis explains that “for generations, market-driven urbanization has transgressed environmental common sense” (p. 9). The result of this skirting of limits has been tragedy. And when disasters have struck in L.A., time after time those in power have shirked the culpability that Davis believes is rightly theirs by insisting that fickle nature is at fault. This notion of unnatural disasters predates Ted Steinberg’s similar insight, which lies at the core of his Acts of God.{6} Most recently, the idea that natural disasters are not always natural, that they sometimes are socially produced, has run throughout the best coverage of the Katrina tragedy, particularly as the media confronted its own shocked response to the chaos after the hurricane hit. When officials at all levels of government tried to hide behind the rhetoric of a “natural” disaster, they found a skeptical audience armed with reams of studies suggesting the mayhem had been caused by poor planning, an inadequate response, and a culture addicted to technology.

Davis makes four points about disasters that may be applicable throughout urban America. First, L.A. was settled during a period of relatively calm weather following an era of unusually high rainfall in the West. Consequently, assumptions about the city’s disaster future are flawed, based as they are on too narrow a temporal data set. Second, disasters are often products of feedback loops that are too complicated to predict or comprehend, rather than just an outgrowth of an immediately understood causal chain. In these cases, technologies intended to control nature sometimes exacerbate the problems they were designed to solve. Third, most people believe that technologies that may actually be worse than useless will keep them safe in the event of a catastrophe. Fourth, “disaster amnesia is a federally subsidized luxury” (p. 47). This quartet, when mingled in an unstable urban environment, makes for a dangerous cocktail. This is true in LA. And we can see how true it was in New Orleans, which now may be in the midst of a period of more intense storms than ever before in the city’s history, where the post-Katrina chaos was born of factors so complex that the real cause of the disaster may never be fully revealed, where people had misplaced faith in a drainage system and levees that failed them, and where the wealthiest citizens likely will rebuild with federal flood insurance bankrolling their efforts to forget.

Davis’s most compelling material is found in his chapter on fire, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” Picking up where McPhee left off in another New Yorker essay that became the third chapter of The Control of Nature, Davis suggests that fire suppression in the mountains bordering Los Angeles is a fool’s errand.{7} Wildfires not only are part of a natural cycle; the longer vegetation grows between burns, the worse the eventual conflagration will be. Had Davis stopped there, he would have been writing in McPhee’s long shadow. Instead, he deepens the discussion by adding the case of apartment fires in inner-city buildings. Not as worried about the line between causation and correlation as Colten, Davis notes archly that the incidence of wild and urban fires in LA is statistically similar. From there, the two cases diverge: expensive cliff dwellings perched on the urban edge are protected by armies of firefighters; tenements burn with little attention from the city. Federal insurance provides seed money to movie stars who will rebuild mansions in the hills; immigrants in the city lose everything and move on. It’s a brutal story, filled with sarcastic asides. By the end of the book Los Angeles seems a cruel city, equal parts Sodom and Gomorrah, a place deserving of the fate that Davis is certain lurks in its near future. That nearly a decade has passed since Ecology of Fear was published and yet L.A. still stands might surprise readers of this book. Davis, one expects, would shake his head and say, “Just wait.”

Philip Fradkin may be angling to become Northern California’s answer to Mike Davis—ideally, one suspects, without the nasty controversies, but with the brisk sales, if you please. Fradkin’s caustic observations about San Francisco’s disaster history and pessimism about the city’s future match Davis’s views of Los Angeles, even if he lacks Davis’s flair for metaphor and creative juxtaposition. Fradkin also shares Davis’s grave doubts about efforts to control nature, particularly in a dynamic environment like San Francisco’s. If he does not quite see disaster as ordinary there, he remains certain that the next quake is coming. And that the city is not ready.

The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906 is one of a trio of new books about the San Francisco earthquake, all presumably released to capitalize on the hundredth anniversary (18 April 2006) of what Fradkin insists was the worst urban disaster in the nation’s history.{8} He dismisses the 1900 Galveston hurricane, which is sometimes awarded that mantle, as politically unimportant; so much for the six thousand people who died in the storm surge and the rise of Houston as a result of the carnage. Chicago’s 1871 fire was not even half as large as the blaze that followed the San Francisco quake, he notes, and he does not even mention the 1889 Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood, which is considered a contender in circles easily mesmerized by David McCullough’s stirring voice and print narration. Of course, such squabbles do not seem quite as interesting now that Katrina has taken the title outright, a bit of renown New Orleans surely can live without. When it comes to his thesis, though, Fradkin is less focused on scale, list-making notwithstanding, than on causation. He insists that the earthquake was not natural. Or rather, while the quake may have been natural—Fradkin seems willing to concede the point—the disaster was caused by people, elites who ignored well-known hazards embedded in the city’s accident-prone site and then collaborated with the media to keep the danger quiet. “San Franciscans, not the inanimate forces of nature, were primarily responsible for the extensive chaos, damage, injuries, and deaths in the great earthquake and firestorms of 1906” (p. xl). So important is the argument, familiar to readers of Colten, Davis, and McPhee, that it is the first line in Fradkin’s preface. Cut to the chase, indeed.

Fradkin spends half of his book describing the earthquake, whose gruesome particulars are already well known. Still, this exposition is gripping, if grim. Fradkin is a commendable researcher and a totally committed and capable social historian. He recovers the voices of a wide array of common people, allowing his varied subjects to speak for themselves. The text, consequently, can sometimes seem a bit like a parade of quotes. Overall, though, the effect is laudable, as even well-worn terrain like the intentional destruction of Chinatown feels fresh again, though the accompanying tone of righteous indignation can be tedious. Fradkin is also an excellent storyteller, keenly aware of the importance of engaging characters. Fortunately, he has no shortage of these. The book is peppered with colorful anecdotes, including the case of opera singer Enrico Caruso, whose presence in the earthquake and later escape from the ruins tells readers volumes about San Francisco’s Gilded Age culture.

The meat of the book, what’s new here, arrives in the second half, which concerns the disaster’s aftermath. It was then that “the rich and powerful . . . usurped the functions of government” (p. xl): first by having a citizens’ committee order looters (as fluidly defined here as they were in post-Katrina New Orleans) shot on sight; then by persecuting Asian Americans as part of a concerted Anglo land grab that may seem familiar to observers paying attention to the politics of rebuilding (or not rebuilding) parts of the Crescent City’s battered Ninth Ward; and finally by cooking the books to ensure that the rich did better than San Francisco’s common folk during the relief effort. Fradkin is also interested in the politics of reconstruction, particularly the ways that powerful California Progressives like James D. Phelan used the quake as justification for race baiting, which then brought them expanded power and popularity.

In the end, though, the most poignant part of a book that now lives in the shadow of Hurricane Katrina may be Fradkin’s lament for how little San Francisco learned from the tragedy. The city rose from ruin too quickly to implement proper planning, instead building on loose soil—so-called made land—and hushing up talk about the next major earthquake. Fradkin notes that the death toll, which is still unknown, would have been much higher had the temblor taken place during business hours. Most troubling, seismologists predict that the next major quake will happen soon, likely some time in the next three decades. Worse still, it will be centered in an urban region that is approximately twenty times larger than it was in 1906.

If you are looking for an antidote to the depressing fare typical of the disaster literature, pick up The Resilient City, a collection edited by Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella. These well-illustrated essays examine topics ranging from the aftermath of the recent terrorist attacks on Oklahoma City and Manhattan to the rebuilding of Washington following the British invasion in 1814, the rise of Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo from the rubble and ashes of World War II, and the reconstruction of Mexico City and Tangshan, China, following earthquakes. These and several other cases make up a “global tour of disaster and recovery”(p. 335). Despite all the included destruction, The Resilient City maintains an optimistic tone, in refreshing contrast to Davis and Fradkin. The book is also commendable for its vast geographic reach and long temporal arc, and for drawing from a variety of disciplines: Asia to North America, the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first, art history to urban studies. On the opposite side of the ledger, despite its remarkable sweep and recent publication, the book feels somewhat timebound, even anachronistic in places. This is a book written in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks, and one has the sense that the editors and authors might now regret having used the destruction of the World Trade Center as their baseline for urban catastrophe.

The backdrop of 9/11 does not, however, undermine the book’s utility or its principal argument, which is that modern cities, no matter how severely they’ve been damaged, almost always have recovered. As Vale and Campanella put it: “Although cities have been destroyed throughout history—sacked, shaken, burned, bombed, flooded, starved, irradiated, and poisoned—they have, in almost every case, risen again like the mythic phoenix” (p. 3). This is an upbeat point, at least in the context of disaster studies, and something New Orleanians might celebrate. But Vale and Campanella complicate their thesis by recognizing that observers must pay attention to the meaning of “recovery.” Does the word refer to a city’s return to its predisaster population, economic activity, or emotional stability? And who comes through the horror unscathed or able to move on most easily? Although these insights would be interesting enough on their own as we cope with our hurricane hangover, The Resilient City goes further, suggesting why cities recover from even the worst calamities: namely, that they are rebuilt because of their symbolic value, their economic centrality, and the influence of their citizens. In other words, the reconstruction of cities confers renewed legitimacy on governments, forestalls economic downturns, and placates a significant portion of the electorate. In sum, cities are rebuilt because it is politically expedient for those in power to rebuild them.

Thus it is that New Orleans’s future, which might at least briefly have seemed rather bright during stretches of The Resilient City, begins to appear cloudy again by the book’s end. Despite a full slate of examples of cities that have weathered episodes just as or even more destructive than Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans may have an even bigger problem, unrelated to technology or inclement weather. The city, unfortunately, makes a lousy symbol for those in power right now; it is a constant reminder of the state’s failure to secure the safety of its citizens. Nature, therefore, is no longer an enemy of the state along the lower Mississippi. Moreover, if rebuilding comes down to questions of power, New Orleans is in deep trouble. The city has lost population, economic clout, and even some of its cultural standing over the last two decades. Its port remains a crucial feature in the nation’s commercial landscape, and its food, music, and architecture, not to mention social complexities, are all foundations of the American scene. But the city was suffering long before Katrina battered and then drowned it. Sadly, New Orleans must now go to Washington with hat in hand in order to secure its future. The city needs federal funding to keep paying for technologies that purport to control nature. Without this money, and the artifice it buys, the city will die. There it is: New Orleans, once our Amsterdam, may become an American Atlantis, forgotten beneath the waves.

So, with the Gulf Coast cleanup ongoing—although in many parts of the region it has not even really started—people are looking for some way to envision a future for New Orleans and its hinterlands. The city’s mayor, Ray Nagin, and Louisiana’s governor, Kathleen Blanco, have put together advisory panels comprising activists, experts, and muckety-mucks (who have been duly criticized for being too heavily weighted with muck). These people, we are told, will make the decisions that will lift New Orleans from its current prostrate state, wring the city out, and make it safer in the future. In doing so, they will have to face choices—a great many of which will be about technology and the environment—that boggle the mind. Most difficult, perhaps, will be the issue of which neighborhoods will be rebuilt and which will not. For the moment the committees are trying to punt; they have suggested allowing the market to make the choice for them. But if McPhee, Colten, Davis, Fradkin, Vale, and Campanella offer any single conclusion, it is this: disasters outmuscle not only the invisible hands of capitalism but also the finest technologies arrayed by flesh and blood to control nature. And if I have learned anything from the depressing spectacle of Katrina and its aftermath, it is this: in considering the present and the future, one should not forget the past. That may seem self-serving coming from a historian. It may also be a bit of a cliché. But Louisiana’s reconstruction committees could do far worse in thinking about their job than to consult the literature on cities, technology, and urban disasters.

{1}John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York, 1989); Craig Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge, 2005); Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York, 1998); Philip Fradkin, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco nearly Destroyed Itself (Berkeley, Calif., 2005); and Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella, eds., The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster (New York, 2005).

{2}The second chapter of The Control of Nature, “Cooling the Lava,” deals with a volcanic eruption in Iceland. In a classic scholar’s dodge, I will just say that it is beyond the scope of this essay. McPhee’s third chapter, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” will figure later in this review.

{3}John McPhee, “The Control of Nature: Atchafalaya,” New Yorker, 23 February 1987, 39–44.

{4}By way of full disclosure, I read Colten’s book in manuscript. I liked it then. I like it now. I have a blurb on the back jacket. If that seems like inside baseball, let me suggest that this essay is less an academic review than a rumination about nature, technology, and urban disaster in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

{5}Peirce Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, 2nd ed. (Santa Fe, 2003).

{6}Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York, 2000).

{7}John McPhee, “The Control of Nature: Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” pts. 1 and 2, New Yorker, 26 September 1988, 45–78, and 3 October 1988, 72–90; reprinted in The Control of Nature, 183–272.

{8}The others are Dennis Smith, San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires (New York, 2005), and Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (New York, 2005).

Ari Kelman is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley, Calif., 2003), which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award in 2004. His essays on Katrina and New Orleans have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Nation, Slate, and a variety of other newspapers and academic publications.

©2006 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Some years ago, when I was in graduate school at Northwestern University, we had a Friday noon seminar on aspects of science and technology. I recall one meeting that featured a paper on high-energy physics. One of the senior physicists, Arnold Siegert, who had been a student of Heisenberg’s, got into an argument with a charming but not overly reverent mathematician (whose name I regrettably don’t remember) about the physical interpretation of mathematical formalisms. It was the ancient quarrel about whose reality was better, the mathematicians’ Platonic idealism or the physicists’ experimental materialism. At issue was some particle-decay process with a probability of ten to the minus something or other, which, when translated, meant that it should occur approximately once every thirty or so billion years, or once in twice the believed age of the universe. Finally, the mathematician, in some exasperation, asked, “Arnold, what would you do if you observed this phenomenon?” There was a silence. Then Siegert replied, almost impishly, “Not tell anyone.” It’s a splendid stratagem for improbable events in subatomic physics, but it doesn’t scale well for hurricanes. Too big.

What’s striking about Hurricane Katrina is that, like the nuclear physicists, everybody knew it was going to happen—sooner or later. Certainly anyone who’d lived in New Orleans or in Louisiana or on the Gulf Coast for very long knew. My grandmother was born and raised in New Orleans, in what’s now more hopefully than veridically called the Garden District, and I grew up with the folklore of the River and hurricanes. Later, when I was at Tulane, we lived in an apartment building that faced South Claiborne Avenue but backed up to the old Sugar Bowl. Between our building and the stadium were the university’s practice fields, five or six of them. On each side of each regulation 100-yard field were two or three gently contoured, sodded sumps, perhaps 30 yards long and 10 yards wide, maybe 4 or 5 feet deep, with a large drain at the bottom. When the cloudbursts came, which was often, the sumps would rapidly fill up. South Claiborne is about 60 yards wide at that spot, with two lanes in each direction separated by a broad grass esplanade, which covers one of the several major canals that drain New Orleans. From our sixth-floor apartment we could see the end of South Claiborne as it curved around, and we would watch for the pumps down there to come on. Sooner or later we’d see the smoke from the big diesel engines that drove the pumps, and pretty soon the water in the sumps would go down, usually in only ten or fifteen minutes. When it was later rather than sooner, there wasn’t much mystery about what would happen if it were ever never.

I also remember one blurry morning sitting in Jackson Square, as gentle night gave way to merciless day, watching the strippers go home, tired and flat-footed. I had one of those “what’s wrong with this picture?” moments as it dawned on me that the hull of the freighter I was looking up at was visible above the top of the levee. We clambered across the railroad tracks behind the old Jax brewery (in those less troubled days the night watchman only fussed at us a little) and up onto the levee. Sure enough, the river stage was a good 20 or 25 feet higher than where I’d been sitting in Jackson Square.

The river levees at New Orleans are challenged, severely, at least once a year, usually more often, and the powers that be have quite rationally devoted the most attention to them.{1} The rest of the city is protected too, but driving around in the then recently built subdivisions out by City Park and Lakefront Airport, on Lake Pontchartrain, it was pretty obvious what the consequences would be if the northeast quadrant of a “perfect storm” got into Chandeleur and Mississippi Sounds: a massive storm surge would be driven through Lake Borgne into Lake Pontchartrain, and then into New Orleans. Sooner or later.

Some years later, I drove over to Old River, where the Red River, the Mississippi, and the Atchafalaya come together, about 300 river miles above New Orleans. Old River Control, so memorably portrayed in John McPhee’s Control of Nature, is a set of massive spillways, a gargantuan navigation lock, and now a hydroelectric power station (then under construction) that together regulate the flow of water from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya Basin. The entire complex was nearly obliterated in the great 1973 flood. The basic problem is that the River—the Mississippi, anthropomorphized since the beginning of time—“wants” to go down the Atchafalaya; the distance to the Gulf is about one-third, and the gradient is twice as steep. We don’t want it to.

I stood on the lock structure, at least half a mile long, talking to the solitary lock-tender, a native Cajun. The lock was so big—to admit the huge tows that pass between the rivers—that he used an old Schwinn bicycle to commute between the gate-control houses at either end of it. We were talking about the River and what had happened in 1973. I noticed a big island off to the northwest and asked if it were Turnbull Island, allowing that my granddaddy had logged it in 1910. That and the fact that I’d said “Turnbull” correctly (think about how Creedence Clearwater Revival says “turnin’” or “burnin’” in “Proud Mary”—it’s a pronunciation unique to about four parishes in central Louisiana) put him at ease. I wasn’t some outsider come to make trouble, dinky little foreign car or not, but a near-native, come home to talk about the River. We chatted for a while, and I finally asked him straight out whether he thought the works at Old River would hold. He laughed and said something to the effect that the River had been doing what it wanted for a lot longer than we had been trying to control it, and “sooner or later . . . .” I asked what he was going to do when it happened. He laughed again and, pointing to where he stood on the massive concrete lock structure, said, “I’m gonna come right here. It’s the highest point in eight parishes.”

What’s curious about these little vignettes is that they’re all implicitly cast as narratives about nature, when they’re really as much about what Tom Hughes calls “the human built world.” We do live on a restless, if not malevolent, planet, whose dynamics we barely grasp. But we also do stupid things. Short-run avarice always trumps long-run prudence, and so we build taxpayer-insured houses on barrier islands and in known floodplains. Our interventions have unintended, if not unforeseeable, consequences. The land inside the levees, along the rivers, is higher now than the land outside, which the levees ostensibly protect, as the land outside, deprived of sediment, slowly subsides.

These vignettes also have something else in common: an attitude toward certainties of very low probability. It’s not bravado or fatalism; too melodramatic. And it’s not a “form of life” or “a life world”; too highfalutin. It’s just there. People in New Orleans and south Louisiana know about the River and about hurricanes the way people in other places know about earthquakes or volcanoes or mudslides or the lethal build-up of carbon dioxide in deep lakes. It’s part of natural-born culture, like the way “ur” is pronounced in four parishes in Louisiana. It doesn’t diminish the human (and animal) tragedy of a Katrina to say that everybody knew. What historians of technology might want to think about is how we think about what’s ours and what’s nature’s, why we conflate the two, and whether our tacit intuition that they are the same speaks more wisely than we know.

{1}Rational in this sense: The expected value of a probabilistic bad event is its probability times its cost. A risk portfolio comprises the sum of the risks’ expected values. If resources can be applied to reduce probabilities or ameliorate costs, the value of the entire portfolio (total risk) is minimized when the marginal decrement in expected value per dollar spent is equal for all risks. Thus, assuming it’s immaterial whether New Orleans is flooded by the river or by a storm surge, it is rational to expend disproportionate resources to combat the more likely risk, which is river flooding.

Ironically, publicly funded flood-control measures more often than not have contradictory results. Usually they are undertaken explicitly as economic development initiatives and, if successful, as in New Orleans’ eastern wards, increase the cost of a disaster at the same time they putatively reduce its probability. Thus expected value is little improved. Moreover, implementation of this rationalist risk-management strategy assumes perfect knowledge and perfect foresight (known probabilities and costs), which is usually transmogrified into the assumption that the future will be pretty much like the past. Thus economics, that allegedly most rigorous of social-science disciplines, routinely makes an assumption that few if any professional historians would defend unequivocally.

Edward Constant taught history of technology at Carnegie-Mellon University, and is a native of Louisiana.

©2006 by the Society for the History of Technology.