Hurricane Katrina as a Lens for Assessing Socio-Spatial Change in New Orleans.

Watkins, Case; Hagelman, III, Ronald R.

Disasters are acute events that affect populated landscapes at discrete points in their history. In many locations, these discrete events occur repeatedly over time. This chronology has chorological implications in that one generation’s disaster reconstruction zone could be the next generation’s disaster site. This build-disaster rebuild approach also occurs within the context of changing social and environmental conditions, the interactions of which have direct implications to the outcome of a specific disaster event. This research focuses on the changing social geography of a large urban disaster site (New Orleans, Louisiana) by employing the U.S. Census, digital inundation data, and a GIS to conduct a spatial analysis of flood patterns during Hurricane Katrina. Following the initial analysis, we replicate our methodology across the three decennial census periods prior to 2000. While the initial analysis discerns the statistical relationship among race, income, and Katrina’s deluge, the subsequent temporal analysis illuminates the changing social patterns that preceded the Katrina-era landscape. In this manner, we use hurricane inundation as a lens to view 35 years of sociospatial change in New Orleans.

LOUISIANA; NEW Orleans (La.); HURRICANE Katrina, 2005; HISTORICAL geography; SOCIAL change; HUMAN geography; SPATIAL analysis (Statistics); CITIES & towns & the environment

Southeastern Geographer, 2011, Vol 51, Issue 1, p110

0038-366X

Academic Journal

10.1353/sgo.2011.0009