ABSTRACT
Transforming a natural landscape into a cityscape is a costly endeavor anywhere, but particularly in a subtropical deltaic environment with soft alluvial soils and a complex human history. A 1927 City Planning and Zoning Commission report contended that New Orleans's urbanization costs were "much higher than in other cities built on different terrain". From the early 1700s to the early 1900s, nearly all New Orleanians lived on the higher natural levees close to the Mississippi River. Elevated, better drained, arable, and more convenient, these lands were vastly more attractive and cheaper to urbanize than the low-lying cypress swamps and saline marshes near Lake Pontchartrain. Tremendous social transformations forged new racial relationships in mid- to late-20th-century New Orleans. In the early 2000s, amid vocal opposition but with the overwhelming support of the general population, the solidly built structures of the St. Thomas, Desire, Fischer, and other projects were demolished and redeveloped with pastel-colored new urbanist designs.
