Joshua Alan Lewis

• PhD
• Professor at Tulane University

This article explores recent developments along the Mississippi River Ship Channel, the Mississippi River Delta, and the port city territory of New Orleans, US. The lower reaches of the Mississippi River through which the ship channel is maintained have become increasingly porous over the past decade, as flooding events have triggered or expanded m...

Urban infrastructure will require transformative changes to adapt to changing disturbance patterns. We ask what new opportunities hybrid infrastructure-built environments coupled with landscape-scale biophysical structures and processes-offer for building different layers of resilience critical for dealing with increased variation in the frequency,...

Harbor deepening projects in the southeastern United States illuminate a global phenomenon: navigable rivers and coastal estuaries have been dredged to new depths as port authorities and governments compete to accommodate and benefit from new generations of massive oceangoing ships. This urbanized region has dozens of ports situated in estuaries an...

We develop an analytical repertoire for understanding historical interrelationships between water infrastructure, regional environmental politics, and large-scale coastal ecosystems. In doing so, we scrutinize how notions of urban resilience, climate adaptation, and ecosystem-based infrastructure are influencing contemporary planning practice. Our...

We often think of maritime transportation chokepoints as locations where trade flows are constricted or obstructed: the Panama Canal, narrow straits, shallow river mouths, and the like. But the infrastructure projects built to facilitate transportation may generate ecological chokepoints. These are sites where human intervention inhibits or elimina...

Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the...

This paper uses a case study of the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood in New Orleans to examine the relationships between green tourism and sustainability discourse in shaping the post-Katrina rebuilding process. Specially, we draw on long-term ethnographic field observations to highlight the tensions between abstract and idealized conceptions of susta...

Despite growing interest in urban resilience, remarkably little is known about vegetation dynamics in the aftermath of a major urban flooding. In this study, we examined the composition and structure of plant communities across New Orleans (Louisiana, USA) following catastrophic flooding triggered by levee failures during Hurricane Katrina in 2005....

Scholars have shown that technical standards play an important role in building global transportation and communication infrastructures, but the environmental standardization efforts associated with infrastructures have received far less attention. Combining scholarship from transportation geography, political ecology, and science and technology st...

This paper uses a case study of the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood in New Orleans to examine the relationships between green tourism and sustainability discourse in shaping the post-Katrina rebuilding process. Specially, we draw on long-term ethnographic field observations to highlight the tensions between abstract and idealized conceptions of susta...

This paper is a multidisciplinary approach to framing the potential for community resettlement in Southeast Louisiana. The paper has three sections: a survey of legal mechanisms used by the federal government to relocate individuals and resettle communities; a history of community dislocation in Southeast Louisiana; and a demographic analysis of th...