Re-Newing New Orleans: A Look at Why New Urbanism is the Key to Rebuilding New Orleans
The widespread destruction of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina represents a unique opportunity to rebuild the public infrastructure and residential landscape of a major city on a different set of principles for urban planning and design. This exploratory article reviews the social and demographic condition of the city of New Orleans before and after the national disaster, presents new urbanism as a potential framework for urban renewal, and provides a case study of the Hill District in Pittsburgh as a model for local policymakers.
Urban Social Theory: City, Self, and Society
1. THE ROOTS OF SOCIAL THEORY 2. URBAN HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY 3. COMMUNITY, MODERNITY, ALIENATION AND ANOMIE 4. IMAGES OF THE CITY AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING 5. URBAN CRIME AND DEVIANCE 6. THE DIVIDED CITY, INEQUALITY, AND UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT 7. GLOBALISATION, LOCAL AND CENTRAL STATE REALTIONS AND POLITICS 8. PLACE AND POLITICS 9. PLANNING, PROFESSIONALISATION AND PUBLIC PARTICIPATION 10.THE POLITICS OF TENURE 11.THE FAMILY, GENDER AND THE EFFECTS OF LOCATION 12.POSTMODERNITY AND THE END OF UTOPIA
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.