In late 2005, a few months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the moribund New Orleans tourist industry began offering “Katrina Tours.” Big Easy Tours charges forty-three dollars for a three-hour bus ride through devastated areas of the city, neighborhoods most passengers have seen before in the images shown on television for a few weeks after the hurricane: collapsed roofs cradling upturned cars, stranded residents frantically waving their hands at passing news helicopters, corpses drifting alongside sodden couches down the channels that coursed through the Lower Ninth Ward, emptying finally into the Industrial Canal.

I noticed these businesses in October 2006, when I first visited New Orleans to work on ACORN Housing’s community-based “People’s Plan” for rebuilding the Lower and Upper Ninth Ward. (I returned three times over the next year and a half.) Tour buses drove through mostly decimated neighborhoods—camera flashes flickering from behind closed windows—as locals worked to rebuild their homes and their lives. All the attention left Lower Ninth residents deeply ambivalent; though wary of seeing their misfortunes turned into a spectacle for the ogling eyes of outsiders, they nonetheless hoped the laggard process of rebuilding would gather speed if more visitors from other parts of the country were to witness the dismal condition of their neighborhoods and the mystifying absence of any substantial reconstruction effort. But their hope proved abortive. As the attention of the mass media has waned, so has the willingness of residents to brook these hourly incursions. Cajun Encounters recently suspended tours of the Ninth Ward, explaining gingerly that residents “have asked us not to enter those areas any longer.”

I first considered this “disaster tourism” as an extension of the phenomenon of “slum tourism” increasingly common in Rio de Janeiro, as well as Mumbai and Nairobi. (There is a precedent in our country: In the ’90s, out-of-towners made pilgrimages to soak up scenes of life in South Bronx.) A typical tourist thought of Rio and New Orleans as meccas of tropical bacchanal, with grand old buildings imbuing their colonialist histories with a sensuous, charming aspect—one that was further enhanced by the hedonistic nightlife, musical diversity, and raucous festivals of Carnival and Mardi Gras. That such imagery obscured the tremendous disparity between rich and poor was beside the point; that is not what the tourists came to see. Now, with the proliferation of “socially responsible” tourist excursions to third-world sites, many come for precisely that reason.

Favela tours cater to a market that wants a face-to-face encounter with “the real Rio”; they simultaneously fortify and debunk stereotypes regarding violence and poverty by showcasing those conditions while also arranging for benign elements of the affected populations to mingle with (and peddle cooperatively produced wares to) the tourist. The film City of God helped foster a thriving industry around exporting images of Rio’s slums to Western audiences. In New Orleans, the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, along with Spike Lee’s nationally televised documentary When the Levees Broke, had a similar effect.


The Katrina tours are not only composed of visitors taking a break from their French Quarter revelry to gawk at the destruction wrought by nature’s fury and government negligence; they also cater to real estate speculators, volunteer groups working on disaster relief, and attendees of the numerous professional conferences held in the Central Business District. From the vantage point of a bus seat, with a “real New Orleanian” holding forth on the community’s traditions and lore, these patrons are able to glimpse what they cannot experience: life in the Lower Ninth Ward, before and after. The slight distortion of the aisle speakers, the quarter-inch lens of the glass windows, and the steady speed of the bus itself all conspire to perfect the image of history recently made.

From above and below

I began to think of my own presence in New Orleans as that of a walker, my experience of the city taking place at the same speed and from the same vantage point as those of the residents with whom I worked—however else our experiences differed. Only I would walk not just from one point to the next, in between bus stops and neighbors’ houses, but to all points across an area designed to make foot traffic between neighborhoods nearly impossible. Drawing on my particular obsession with the literature on walking and urbanism—I was, after all, a graduate student in urban planning at the time—I set out to wander attentively and deliberately through the Lower Ninth Ward. I hoped that such a perspective could be an antidote—more realistically, a momentary alternative—to the omniscient view presented by news cameras, the aerial photographs that dominate contemporary cartography and urban planning, and the pointedly limited vantage point offered by tourist buses.

In the cities of the developed world, walking is no longer the most common mode of transportation. In fact, nearly all advances in transportation technology and urban design have impeded free movement on foot. In “Walking in the City,” a 1984 essay that helped shape my understanding of this phenomenon, and one I found myself reading repeatedly during the time I spent working in New Orleans, French philosopher Michel de Certeau writes, “The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins.” From the top of the World Trade Center, he saw Manhattan as an image of order and geometric discipline, in contrast with the messy, dynamic configurations observable at street level, where walking constitutes “an elementary form of the experience of the city.” The movements of people become “intersecting writings” with “neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alternations of spaces; in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.”

What I saw while walking was a desolate environment mostly devoid of people, haunted by infrastructure meant to accommodate railroads and ships and suburban commuters, the supply of which has been significantly depleted: a few smudged lines across a crumpled canvas, running up against great swaths of gray paint. The built environment has moved to the foreground; it speaks to its own absence of purpose in today’s New Orleans, and it speaks where there is otherwise silence.

What follows, then, is a tour of sorts, a walk through the remnants of the Ninth Ward (as it was last March), accompanied by a conversation with some of its residents.