Abstract New Orleans in 1900 was an endangered city clinging to a narrow strip of relatively high ground along the lower Mississippi river. Frequent flooding occurred from the river in the spring and from the lake in the June to October hurricane season. No reliable source of drinking water and no systems for removal of sewerage and rain water existed. Disease mortality was very high especially from frequent outbreaks of yellow fever. The fortuitous appearance of new alternating current (AC) technologies, emerging engineering specialties, and a more progressive form of governance willing to support and finance large scale engineering projects gave New Orleans world class drainage, sewerage and potable water systems. With electric streetcars providing service to newly drained areas and greatly reduced disease mortality, New Orleans entered the twentieth century transformed into a safe and expanding city. Key Words: Electricity, New Orleans, Infrastructure

archives@tulane.edu / 1 / Jason Straight

The tourism industry (TI) brings substantial resources into New Orleans, Louisiana (NOLA); and yet many of its workers continue to experience high levels of poverty and related socio-economic issues. Previous research has adequately addressed how the TI impacts the city on a macroeconomic level, but no studies have yet been conducted on those working within it. This study demonstrates that NOLA TI workers are experiencing multiple dimensions of poverty. For this research the common definition of poverty is expanded beyond income levels and asset holdings to include: quality of life; social and political empowerment; personal and property security; and educational and professional opportunities. This emergent qualitative research study draws upon archival data to garner official and objective descriptive statistics, and in-depth interviews with TI workers. A conceptual framework originally devised by Weibing Zhao and JR Ritchie is augmented using research from the fields of Anti-Poverty Tourism (APT), Satisfaction With Life (SWL) surveys, and Capabilities Approach. This revised framework is then applied to the responses provided by 61 NOLA TI workers that were interviewed. This study finds that levels of income and asset poverty among NOLA TI workers are significantly higher than the rest of the city, state, or country. Additionally, age, race, and gender do not play significant factors in determining levels of poverty among workers, but job category plays a small role. While levels of security, opportunity, empowerment and quality of life (SOEQ) may be demonstrably low among TI workers, they frequently perceive them to be high. The hypothesis of "u201cgeographical capital"u201d is presented which maintains there are non-wage factors keeping workers in their occupations due to their love for the city based on their reasons for moving to it. These factors may enrich workers"' lives in other ways, but they are not correlated to higher levels of SOEQ. This hypothesis is rejected. The hypothesis of "u201crelationships as compensation"u201d is then presented. It suggests there are non-wage factors for which workers are willing to endure higher levels of different kinds of poverty in exchange for developing and maintaining extensive social networks. The evidence supports accepting this hypothesis. International development researchers and policy-makers can design and implement new policies focusing on social networks and personal relationships to decrease nontraditional forms of poverty. In this way the research aims to inform the poverty, labor, and tourism dialogues within the context of international development in New Orleans and elsewhere. / Andrew McLaurin Ward

1 / Kyle Arthur DeCoste

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Louisiana State University, 1965. / "An authorized facsimile ..." Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International, 1980. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 1327-1343).

archives@tulane.edu / The “creative city” is a cross-disciplinary concept with competing and contradictory meanings and applications. This dissertation responds to scholarly calls for situated analyses of creative city making and contributes to collective understanding of how multiple conceptualizations of the creative city manifest, collide, and intertwine in practice within a specific place and time: New Orleans in the decade following Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures (2005-2015). In the wake of disaster, every resident was called upon to “be creative” in rebuilding the city, yet stakeholders understood and operationalized creativity in different ways. The primary research question asks: what happens in the transmutation of the creative city as it morphs between theoretical concept, rhetorical ideal, and practical strategy? The study design is a multi-method qualitative analysis using document analysis and interviews. I first describe the role of creativity in rebuilding efforts as understood and expressed by elected officials, artists, cultural producers, activists, and rebuilding professionals. Findings from this part of the analysis demonstrate significant differences between stakeholder groups, but also surprising moments of coalescence. Within this broader inquiry, I then focus on an embedded case study of the 2012-2014 Lots of Progress pitch competitions, a program spearheaded by New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA) in partnership with the nonprofit incubator Propeller, in which vacant lots were offered as the prize for the most creative concepts for their reuse. Here, I answer the research question: when the offer to remake the city through creativity is left open to all, what ideas and values are brought forth? The case study is an example of the powerful and contradictory discourse of creativity. Program organizers and participants were generally aligned in their dual understanding of creativity both as resistance to an unsatisfactory status quo, and as the ability to transform social problems into development opportunities to be solved through entrepreneurship. In the concluding chapter, insights take the form of recommendations and some thoughts on future praxis in the field: (1) rethinking the pitch competition format and purpose, (2) planning and policy to support New Orleans’ cultural ecosystem, and (3) implications for the evolving field of creative placemaking. / 1 / Heidi Schmalbach

Navigating an airport would be nearly impossible without proper signage. The number of gates, the different zones of access, the layers of conveyor belts running through the floors all provide a challenge for the architect designing the airport, even before the signs are sketched out. Projects such as airports or sporting arenas provide an extreme challenge in programmatic proximities for any designer working to make a building's circulation flow. Topology is a branch of mathematics focusing on the geometry of position and connection. By using it in architecture, program connections can be simplified and made into diagrams of edges and nodes. By taking out scale and shape, the problem is made only about connection and proximity. Applying this topological method to a professional soccer stadium in New Orleans puts the process to the test. The complexities of the public and service areas and how they interact creates a need for simplification, otherwise the building will exceed any manageable construction scale. / 0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

The introduction of the automobile drastically changed the urban fabric of our cities. Cars offered unprecedented mobility, so middle-class Americans fled cities in the endless pursuit of personal space. It became necessary to construct a vast network of infrastructure to accommodate the infinite expansion of peripheral districts. So, in the mid-20th century, public works projects were undertaken throughout the country in order to modernize cities around the vehicle. There was great excitement over the engineering feat of the elevated freeway as "an urban sculpture for motion." 1 However, the inevitable enormity of vehicular infrastructure became problematic in historically dense urban centers. Architects and planners accepted the increasing importance of the automobile but were wary of its imposing infrastructure. They understood both the potential of freeways for expansion, as well as the drawbacks of their "mere physical form ... sheer bigness and muscularity." 2 Earlier projects were more mindful of urbanistic principles integrating topography and pedestrian movement into a sectionally-rich infrastructure. There were theoretical projects suggesting a "multilevel metropolis" 3 that argued for the careful integration of buildings and alternative transportation as a way to mitigate the impact of daunting elevated structures. Unfortunately, the rapid expansion of the interstate system began to ignore these strategies. Instead, most cities received the universally engineered solution to simply elevate the highway and obliterate anything in its path. Furthermore, the insertion of massive highway infrastructure occurred overwhelmingly through lower-class neighborhoods under the guise of fixing urban blight. Once vibrant neighborhoods were plowed over with asphalt and isolated from the rest of the city. Some fifty years later, the relevance of the automobile is dwindling, and designers are questioning this invasive highway infrastructure. The elevated highway became a physical and perceptual barrier that has inhibited the growth of countless urban communities. While the simplistic solution argues total removal, or capping, this process is expensive, unsustainable, and only masks the problem. These structures have a legacy and permanence as an architectural element, and have the potential to be part of a larger system for mobility. This thesis argues for the return to more sustainable solutions for a multilevel urban condition with the capacity to reconnect isolated spaces. / 0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu