Site and Situation Flashcards
By combining a strong sense of place to a particular location we can begin to______
Think about other geographic concepts (site and situation)
What did Hurricane Betsy raise?
- Are the protective barriers high enough
- Should federal money be spent on protecting the city in the future and studies (storm modeling and otherwise).
- How problematic is the reduction of marshland along the coast.
What did the article in civil engineering magazine express concern over?
Water, shelter, evacuation routes
To understand the importance of New Orleans you cannot restrict yourself to an examination of the city’s local _____. You have to consider the city’s _____ and you have to begin your examination in ________. You have to take into account the city’s ________
- Site
- History
- Northwestern Minnesota
- Situation
What is site?
The actual real estate the city occupies (in New Orleans, the site can best be described as “wretched”) Concern here is placed on soil, water supply, relief, etc.
What is situation?
What we mean when we speak of a place with respect to its neighboring places. We might say that situation is linked to ‘comparable advantage’.
What are crucial points from looking at the site and situation of New Orleans?
“If a city’s situation is good enough, it’s site will be altered to make do” Lewis (1976, 17)
“New Orleans has a near-perfect situation and almost unimaginably bad site. It is because of the former that people have worked endlessly to overcome the hazards of the latter.”
Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sier de Bienville’s decision was clearly not a_____. He was not concerned with_______.
- A physical geographer.
2. Site
What are some things to take into consideration when choosing a good site?
- A wet area (access to water, water is not all that easy to transport, aqueducts)
- A dry area (offers protection from flooding)
- Access to materials (i.e. for buildings, tools, defense)
- A defensive position (high ground, distance from a political boundary
- Points to fuel supply (water, coal, oil, natural gas)
- Points of intersection (railway, highway, rivers, etc)
- Places that offer protection/shelter (from wind, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc)
What are the four main site problems for New Orleans?
- The river’s current
- Silt (debris/ deposition/ accretion/ erosion/ shifting delta)
- Epidemics (steamy climate)
- Drainage (a watery wilderness)
- flooding, pestilence, sinking, hurricanes
What are some more difficulties for New Orleans’ site?
- The main/ oldest part of New Orleans is built on natural levees (rarely over 15 feet above sea level)
- Much of the city lies below sea level
- The city is surrounded by swamp with no way of getting water out unless it is pumped/ evaporated
- Bedrock (foundation) is minimally 70 feet below the surface
- Avenues into the city are by way of natural levees
- What happens if the Mississippi changes course (Dead end bayou)
- The adjacent areas are poorly populated
- Entrance to the Mississippi is located quite a distance downstream.
What is good about New Orleans’ situation?
- One of the richest river valleys on the planet
- Gatekeeper of the continental interior
- A highway of commerce
- Access to ports (Central and South America, the Carribean, Europe and the Eastern seaboard of North America
Why should New Orleans be rebuilt?
- Inertia of investment
2. Emotional attachment
New Orleans wasn’t just a natural disaster it was _______.
It was a social disaster as well (questions of race, class, the vulnerable, historic cultural identity, risk, technology, media spectacle, governance, attitude)
We live with a host of _______.
Inherited geographies
What are these inherited geographies?
- Realities of topography and weather (physical geography/locational liabilities)
- Three centuries of urbanization in a precarious site (Urban/Economic Geography/Historical Geography)
- In its 300 year history, New Orleans has had about 27 major river or hurricane-induced disasters (a rate of one about every 11 years) - Design decisions/structural protections (political/economic geography)
- Basic pattern has to build higher levees – shift scale/responsibility from the land owner to the state to the federal government - History of class and racial segregation “terrains of vulnerability” (social/cultural geography)
- What is the place of ‘nature’ in the city? (Technological Utopianism)
