ABSTRACT
A few years of haphazard development following the 1718 founding of New Orleans inscribed an initial level of urbanization into the deltaic soil. New Orleans's first hurricane proved to be a blessing in disguise. Wrote Pauger, who was responsible for surveying the new street system, "all these buildings were old and provisionally built, and not a single one in the alignment of the new city and thus would have had to be demolished. Establishing a settlement and surveying its urban plat is one thing; ensuring its survival and prosperity is quite another. One way to gain an advantage toward political and economic sustainability is to attain the status of administrative center, in this case, to become the Company of the West's primary "counter office" (financial headquarters), port, and colonial capital. French colonists swept away their own messy, unplanned beginnings and imposed upon the newly emptied deltaic space a planned Cartesian sense of urban order.
