New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, Third Edition

by Peirce F. Lewis

208 pages, 7 x 10 vertical

77 b&w illustrations

Cloth ISBN 978-1-930066-60-1 • $49.50

Paper ISBN 978-1-930066-61-8 • $24.50

Available February 2009

Center for American Places

“Peirce Lewis’s New Orleans is the best introduction in print to any American city. Much more than a great local guidebook, it is also a model for understanding American cities in general. Using witty, engaging, and accessible text and illustrations, Lewis directs our attention to the large-scale processes that affect New Orleans, as well as to how those processes are linked to what we can see in the everyday streets and buildings of the city.”
—Paul Groth, University of California, Berkeley

“A city of legend, a legendary geographer, and a landscape loved by America’s legions of place-cherishers: These come together in Peirce Lewis’s timely revision of New Orleans. No place so embodies the generational distemper of the baby boomers, and no landscape historian has proved so willing and able to make sense of the face of a place as Peirce Lewis. This is a ticket to the very best kind of geographical adventure.”
—Paul F. Starrs, University of Nevada, Reno

“Peirce Lewis’s original New Orleans earned iconic status in geographical writing on the American city. The appearance of a thoroughly reworked new edition is a devoutly welcome event.”
—Michael P. Conzen, University of Chicago

“In his 1976 New Orleans, Peirce Lewis grappled with the sense of place and soul of this distinctive American city. I welcome this new edition of New Orleans with lots of new material and the insight of Lewis revisiting the city that he loves a quarter of a century later.”
—Edward K. Muller, University of Pittsburgh

“Peirce Lewis’s long overdue second edition is just as pleasurable to read as the original. It exposes the flaws of an inhospitable site, the richness of the local architecture, and the complexities of the city’s social geography with a flair and clarity we all should aspire to.”
—Craig E. Colten, Louisiana State University

This classic work in historical geography, first published in 1976 and then issued by the Center for American Places as a Second Edition in 2003, recounts the evolution of New Orleans from its founding as a European city in the early seventeenth century up to the present time, including in this edition updates on how Hurricane Katrina has affected the city. The city’s geographic location—at the entry to the Mississippi, North America’s largest river—has helped to shape the economic, social, and demographic character of New Orleans for nearly 300 years. In the midst of the Mississippi’s huge, swampy delta, the city’s inhabitants have confronted an array of seemingly impossible environmental challenges. In meeting them, the city’s diverse ethnic groups—French, Spanish, Anglo-American, and African American residents—created a place with a history and culture unlike any other in North America. Here presented in a Third Edition that includes new material and photographs on the effects of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape tells the story of how this remarkable city acquired its special personality and geographic shape, and what challenges now lie ahead for its civic revival.

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Peirce F. Lewis, former President of the Association of American Geographers and Professor of Geography Emeritus at the Pennsylvania State University, has published widely on the American landscape.