Event-based urbanization and the New Orleans tourist regime: a conceptual framework for understanding structural change in US tourist cities

Abstract

Tourism and an event-based economy have fundamentally changed the City of New Orleans, a major urban center in the southern US state of Louisiana. Although the city's stock of tourist establishments declined dramatically in the aftermath of the devastation associated with Hurricane Katrina, recovery of the city's tourism sector has been equally dramatic. Visitor spending is at historic highs, and the number of hotel rooms in the city now exceeds the pre-Katrina figure. Yet the transformation of New Orleans into a tourist city has not occurred in a vacuum: the growth of tourism over the last half century and the industry's rapid recovery since 2005 are due to both structural changes in the international political economy and to deliberate planning strategies adopted at both the state and local levels in response to those changes. In this article, I begin by outlining the impact of tourism and an event-based economy on the New Orleans urban fabric. I then utilize both regulation theory and urban regime theory to account for the significant changes the shift to a tourism economy has brought about in New Orleans, paying particular attention to the ways in which planners and policy-makers have privileged tourism in the city's recovery after Hurricane Katrina. I conclude by considering the planning and policy implications associated with the transition to a tourism and event-based economy.