Kevin Fox Gotham

(Re)Branding the Big Easy: Tourism Rebuilding in Post-Katrina New Orleans

This article draws on primary and secondary data to provide insight into the processes and conflicts over efforts to brand New Orleans as an entertainment destination from the 1990s to the present. The author identifies the key actors and organized interests involved in branding New Orleans, the rationale and logic of branding, and marketing strategies used to enhance place distinctiveness. The second half of the article describes the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleanss tourism sector and examines efforts to rebrand the city. The article points to the problems, contradictions, and unpredictabilities of urban branding. This analysis provides an important opportunity for theoretical development and offers a unique perspective for understanding urban branding as a contested and conflictual process of homogenization and diversification.

Coupled Vulnerability and Resilience: the Dynamics of Cross-Scale Interactions in Post-Katrina New Orleans

We investigate the impact of trauma on cross-scale interactions in order to identify the major social-ecological factors affecting the pace and trajectory of post-Katrina rebuilding in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Disaster and traumatic events create and activate networks and linkages at different spatial and institutional levels to provide information and resources related to post-trauma recovery and rebuilding. The extension, intensification, and acceleration of cross-scale linkages and interactions in response to trauma alter organizational couplings, which then contribute to the vulnerability and resilience of social-ecological systems. Rather than viewing urban ecosystems as either resilient or vulnerable, we conceptualize them as embodying both resilient and vulnerable components. This integrated approach directs analytical attention to the impact of socio- legal regulations, government policies, and institutional actions on resilience and vulnerability, which are also systemic properties of urban ecosystems.

Theorizing urban spectacles

In this paper Kevin Fox Gotham critically explores a number of urban festivals in the US city of New Orleans, namely Mardi Gras, the Jazz and Heritage Festival, and the Essence Festival (previous articles in City have looked at similar topics—see for example Tony Harcup (Vol. 4, No. 2) in relation to Leeds, and Kim Dovey and Leonie Sandercock (Vol. 6, No. 1) in relation to Melbourne. Gotham’s central concern is to develop a critical theory of urban spectacles, using the ideas of Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre, to highlight the conflicts and struggles over meanings of local celebrations, highlight the irrationalities and contradictions of converting cities into tourist spectacles, and wider concerns about the relationship between tourism and local culture. Rather than seeing this spectacularisation of local cultures as simply negative or positive, Gotham discusses how tourism is a conflictual and contradictory process that simultaneously disempowers localities and creates new pressures for local autonomy and resistance. Detailed ethnographic material is used to show how local festivals have become ‘battlefields of contention’, with different groups and interests attempting to produce them for their own ends. In the face of globalised forms of cultural production and consumption that limit creativity, we hear voices from local actors who use urban spectacles to sow seeds of dissent, create breeding grounds for reflexive action and launch radical critiques of inequality.

Toward an understanding of the spatiality of urban poverty: the urban poor as spatial actors

The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of empirical research on the role of space in group life at the same time scholars have lamented the under-theorization of space in sociology. In particular, mainstream poverty researchers have conceptualized space as a neutral backdrop against which action unfolds and viewed poor peoples agency as passive and unreflexive. This article attempts to move beyond this space-as-container ontology and provide a more coherent view of how theorizing space and spatial issues can help us understand the actions of the urban poor. At the core of the paper is an attempt to theorize agency as a spatial phenomenon - with spatial attributes and spatial influences - and offer empirical insight into how different spatial meanings can enable or constrain particular forms of social action and behavior. My intent is to contribute to an understanding of the urban poor as spatial actors. I argue that the importance of space lies in understanding it as an object of political struggle, a constitutive component of human agency, and a facilitator as well as constraint upon action. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.

Using Space: Agency and Identity in a Public–Housing Development

Recent critiques of conventional poverty research have highlighted the need to move beyond the conceptual limitations of “neighborhood effects” models and the use of the tropes of “adaptation” or “resistance” to explain the behaviors and actions of the urban poor. We use ethnographic field observations and interviews with public–housing residents to address these limitations in the poverty literature, assess competing explanations of poor people’s agency, and provide insight into the importance of space as a mediating link between macrostructural constraints and locally situated behaviors. We theorize agency and identity as spatial phenomena—with spatial attributes and spatial influences—and examine how different spatial meanings and locations enable or constrain particular forms of social action and behavior. Our ethnographic and interview data depict several strategies by which residents “use space” to provide a measure of security and protection, to designate and avoid areas of criminality and drug activity, and to challenge or support the redevelopment of public housing. From these data we show that urban space is not a residual phenomenon in which social action occurs, but a constitutive dimension of social life that shapes life experiences, social conflict, and action.

Political Opportunity, Community Identity, and the Emergence of a Local Anti-Expressway Movement

This study builds on the “community studies” tradition in urban sociology by examining the interconnections among political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and strategic framing in the emergence and outcome of a locally-based movement. Traditional urban analyses contend that there must be an intimate bond of community identity among individuals for them to engage in neighborhood collective action and political mobilization. This article challenges this assumption and examines “community identity” as a political strategy used by neighborhood coalitions and civil rights groups to contest public policies, neutralize counterframes and opposition, and mobilize constituents. I examine the emergence of an anti-expressway movement in Kansas City, Missouri during the 1960s and 1970s to illustrate the structural relationship between political opportunities, mobilization, and identity. Political opportunities not only create motivations for mobilization through “structural” changes (e.g., public policies, cycles of protest, and presence of external allies, etc.), but they also set in motion “ideational” shifts in political culture, expanding the cultural reservoir of strategic frames and enhancing the potency of movement framing.

Racialization and the State: The Housing Act of 1934 and the Creation of the Federal Housing Administration

Research examining the impact of corporate interests, state structures, and class contradictions on the state policy formation process has been dominated by three major theoretical perspectives: business dominance theory, state-centered theory, and Marxian structuralism. I argue that these existing perspectives pay insufficient attention to race and racial discrimination as a central component in the formulation and implementation of state policy. This article uses the concept of racialization to reframe existing theories of the state to explain the origin of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) through the Housing Act of 1934. As an integral component of New Deal legislation, the FHA was created for the purpose of salvaging the home building and finance industries that had collapsed during the Great Depression. I draw on government housing reports and analyses, real estate industry documents, and congressional testimony to examine the racial dynamic of the FHAs housing policies and subsidies. The analysis demonstrates the value of employing a racialization framework to account for the racial motivations surrounding the origin of state policies, the racial basis of corporate interests, and the impact of race and racial discrimination on the creation and development of state structures.

Critical theory and Katrina: Disaster, spectacle and immanent critique

This paper uses the theoretical and analytical resources of critical theory to explore the processes and conflicts over efforts to present tragic events as spectacles, focusing on a case study of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent government response have intensified uncertainty and unpredictability, disclose a new insecurity in US cities, and showed how a predicted disaster could wreck havoc within the US economy and political system. I first examine the ways in which the logic of spectacle and entertainment permeate a major disaster like Katrina. Next, I investigate how media coverage and political commentary on Katrina insinuates its own immanent critique of racial and class divisions in urban America. Finally, I draw attention to how critical tendencies are immanent to the commodification process itself, in the form of disaster tourism and the production of Katrina souvenirs that embrace spectacle to criticize federal policy and build global awareness of New Orleans’s plight. Overall, my goal is to show how the category of immanent critique can play an important role in drawing out the implications of disaster‐as‐spectacle, illustrating the intersection of race and class in US cities, and highlighting the multidimensional, conflictual and contradictory character of spectacles.

Beyond Invasion and Succession: School Segregation, Real Estate Blockbusting, and the Political Economy of Neighborhood Racial Transition

Recent urban scholarship has questioned the validity, methodology, and assumptions of the invasion‐succession model of neighborhood racial transition but has yet to elaborate a framework that extends beyond a critique of ecological theory. In this article, I use the theoretical insights of the sociospatial approach and draw on census data, government documents and reports, in‐depth interviews, and oral histories to examine the racial transition of southeast Kansas City, Missouri after 1950. I advance understanding of neighborhood transition by identifying the key actors, organized interests, and institutional forces that the invasion‐succession model has neglected to incorporate into its explanatory framework. I investigate the critical links between discriminatory school boundary decisions and real estate blockbusting in determining the timing, pace, and magnitude of racial succession. My objective is to fashion an alternative theory of neighborhood racial transition that takes into account the power of events to shape and transform ecological patterns, illuminates the interconnectedness of structural factors and human agency, and highlights the role of powerful actors and organized interests in marketing racial exclusion and reinforcing racially segregated settlement spaces.

Framing the Urban: Struggles Over HOPE VI and New Urbanism in a Historic City

Recent debate over the federal HOPE VI program has focused primarily on whether local applications have met administrative pledges to provide adequate affordable housing to displaced residents of newly demolished public‐housing developments. In this research we take a different direction, examining local processes of political mobilization and strategic framing around a specific type of HOPE VI redevelopment—one that includes construction of a big‐box superstore as part of proposed urban renewal. We argue that the HOPE VI programs formal alignment with New Urbanism created a political opportunity for competing actors to adopt and espouse selective new urbanist themes and imagery to construct and advance divergent visions of what urban space ought to be. Through these framing strategies and struggles, the developer, displaced residents, and opposition groups produced “the City” as a rhetorical object that each then used to advocate specific redevelopment proposals while de‐legitimating competing claims. In this way, the HOPE VI program constitutes more than a new federal housing policy; it offers a new vocabulary for framing and mobilizing collective action in contemporary urban centers.