Barbara Eckstein brings together an eclectic, and surprising, mixture of urbanism, architecture, literary criticism, environmental history, and geography to create a highly original view of the city of New Orleans. Eckstein argues that the stories told about New Orleans, including the folkways and published literary works, have shaped public policy about the city, the perception of the city’s challenges and problems, and the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. Although her research and analysis were completed long before the levees failed in August 2005, the book stands out as a highly relevant critical analysis of the city’s fraught relationship with its environment, its history, and its own representations.

In Sustaining New Orleans, Eckstein views the facts and fictions of the city as mutually intertwined in a complex temporal process that produces the contemporary city and sustains its possibilities for the future. Thus, various policy initiatives—to reconsider the city’s relationship to its hinterland through the City Edges Project, to document its Latin heritage and reclaim its historic role as an economic gateway to Latin America, to “redevelop” public housing, or to rebuild a streetcar line through the Desire Corridor—are shown to be intertwined with the texts, folkways, memories, and informal histories that shape the image of the city.

Each chapter brings into dialogue at least one major text and a moment in the social history of the city and region. Thus, the 1970 confrontation between the Black Panthers and the New Orleans Police is juxtaposed with Ishmael Reed’s 1972 Mumbo Jumbo (Doubleday). Eckstein’s chapter on Storyville and Nelson Algren’s Walk on the Wild Side (Farrar Straus and Cudahy, 1956) explores the collusion between politics, literature, and the film industry in solidifying the city’s reputation as a site of sex tourism for white middle-class male tourists. Anne Rice’s Goth-cult Interview with a Vampire (Knopf, 1976) is discussed as a displacement on the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economies (which are themselves resolutely displaced to the outskirts of the city). Walker Percy’s Moviegoer (Knopf, 1961) is brought into conversation with the issues of environmental public health as the miasmas of cholera, yellow fever, or the petrochemical industry call into question the city’s relationship with the riverine environment. Through Percy’s life and work, Eckstein explores “how a collective unconscious gets built in a place” and “how an environmental consciousness might be developed as well” (p. 103). In a city that long turned its back on the Mississippi River, the question of environmental consciousness is a complex one indeed.
And although the flooding of August–September 2005 came into the city via Lake Pontchartrain (and not the river), the book’s substantial engagement with issues of race, class, and environmental sustainability is startlingly prescient.

Eckstein effectively engages the violence and brutality of the city’s history and utopian visions for its future. If one wanted to find a shortcoming in Eckstein’s vision, it may be that in her focus on textual representations, she has somehow neglected the mundane, the everyday, and the “regular” in lived experiences of the city.

Whether discussing a neo-Hoodoo aesthetic or Vampire Gothic, Eckstein’s writing is unabashedly provocative. In her exploration of the complementary roles of sex workers and preservationists and her comparison of the politicized spirit work of Sister Helen Prejean and Marie Laveau, her fearless interdisciplinarity will prompt anthropologists to consider the range of topics we engage when we do urban research. Her creative engagement with urban literature will incite scholars in the social sciences to open up their work to broader connections and to the creative imagination.

Eckstein uses Prejean’s book, Dead Man Walking (Vintage, 1993) to construct a map of a spirit region, which engages the social, environmental, and ethical relationships obscured by conventional representations of geopolitical borders. The Eckstein–Prejean map connects the St. Thomas housing development with the Angola penitentiary and the bioregion of New Orleans with the river, lakes, and wetlands surrounding it. Remoteness, in Eckstein’s analysis, is what allows one to overlook people’s ethical connections with other people, places, and institutions—in relation to a gamut of issues from state-sponsored execution to environmental justice. In considering issues of sprawl and density, New Urbanism and the demolition of public housing, the growth of gated communities, punitive policing regimes, and the role of social and political activists in seeking to reshape city and society, Eckstein asks: What is the appropriate scale for a human-based, regional democracy? Drawing on Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1984) and adopting Denis Wood’s notion of “citizen map-making” (The Power of Maps, Guilford Press, 1992), Eckstein argues that both scholars and activists all need to construct maps that speak to meaningful scales for our work.
[maps, photographs, references, index.]