Technopolitics and Tenderloins: Sanitation Reform, Segregation, and the Making of Storyville, New Orleans

Nikhil Anand (2020:50), in a discussion of the modernization of water systems in Mumbai, conceptualizes urban infrastructure as a network of “political assemblages” that can be deconstructed to understand how power is articulated within spaces. Following Anand, we analyze the technopolitics of utility infrastructure and waste disposal in the New Orleans neighborhood that became Storyville, the city’s famed red-light district (1897–1917). Storyville, as a byproduct of the city’s Progressive Era efforts to engineer physically and morally salubrious urban spaces, was built on an inherent contradiction: it attempted to racially segregate social space, even as it also reserved sex across the color line as a privilege of white men. The material record helps to demonstrate the dissonance between the facades of the imagined Storyville and the diversity of everyday life there, even as that dissonance has reverberated through cycles of urban redevelopment in the neighborhood during the century since the district closed.