ABSTRACT
The strategic natural advantages that encourage delta urbanization render culturally rich and diverse places, manifested in everything from architecture to linguistics, food, music, traditions, atmosphere, and civic spirit. Deltaic cities also usually claim tumultuous political and military histories, making them among the most fascinating places on Earth. Deltaic cities are treasure troves of the human experience, worth sustaining for their past but even more so for their current and future functions. New Orleans's 19th-century floods inundated only about one-tenth the population, damaged a small percentage of homes, destroyed even fewer, and hardly killed anyone. Deltaic cities often begin as transshipping nodes and develop into ports of national or international importance. Diverting the Mississippi River out of its man-made straitjacket and allowing it to deposit its sediment-laden waters into adjacent coastal wetlands is widely viewed as fundamental to saving the Mississippi Delta.
