From the shores of the Black Sea to the banks of the Mississippi River, more than just distance separated the nineteenth-century port cities of Odessa and New Orleans.Footnote 1 Although both cities had been founded as part of colonial enterprises, New Orleans became tied to a burgeoning Republic, a democratic regime reliant on enslaved labour; whereas Odessa was one of the key harbours of an autocratic empire, in which political freedoms were durably restricted. The comparison of two ports entrenched in politically and geographically distinct settings nonetheless yields unexpected prospects, as it brings together the southern borderlands of two continental empires in the making, themselves expansionist states customarily studied for their contrast rather than their affinities. In the nineteenth century, as both the United States and the Russian empire were expanding overland the growth of large urban centres – New Orleans and Odessa – in contested regions on their southern frontier emphasized the complex character of these borderlands and the need to bring them into a global and trans-imperial framework.
Although this article focuses on two seemingly different cities, its methodological approach responds to earlier methods in comparative urban studies, among them Jennifer Robinson’s call to post-colonize urban studies through the comparison of ‘ordinary cities’ located outside conventional state or regional boundaries. Through a comparative approach, cities like Odessa and New Orleans, often framed within exceptionalist narratives, reveal how their diversity and differences were shaped by processes extending far beyond their physical extent.Footnote 2 At the same time, local factors forged path dependencies that put into question the inevitability of their ascent on the global stage of commerce. The concept of ordinary cities also opens avenues for ‘weak’ rather than ‘integral’ comparisons, as advocated by Elena Trubina in the recent Routledge Handbook of Comparative Global Urban Studies. Trubina argues that such partial comparisons can enhance our understanding of Russia and post-Soviet states within global history.Footnote 3 This approach has antecedents: in the late 1990s, Kate Brown conducted a comparative analysis of Kazakhstan and Montana, focusing on the cities of Karaganda and Billings, respectively a former labour camp and an American frontier railroad town. This study revealed how patterns of urban production created corresponding patterns of subjection, focusing on the parallel process of creating urban grids in spaces emptied of their earlier residents. Similarly, American urbanist Blair Ruble compared so-called second cities – Chicago, Moscow and Osaka – between 1870 and 1920, highlighting how capitalist expansion and societal emancipation shaped the ‘pragmatic pluralism’ of the urbanites. In another study, Nile Green contrasted Barcelona and Bombay, two port cities, to investigate the continuities and fractures between the Mediterranean and Indian maritime contexts.Footnote 4 In this regard, comparing nineteenth-century Odessa and New Orleans holds analytical potential, chief of all for insights into how two peripheral southern ports contended with their local circumstances and the transnational demands of global trade. Because of their chronological parallels, the comparison also provides a framework to analyse the development of cosmopolitan practices and spaces that emerged in response to the pragmatic demands of commerce and urbanization.Footnote 5
The comparison of nineteenth-century Odessa and New Orleans is anchored in their shared roles as crucial nodes in the global trade of grain, foodstuff and cotton between 1800 and the 1860s. Both cities were established through imperial conquest and expansion: New Orleans in 1718 by French colonists claiming the Mississippi Delta, and Odessa in 1794 following Russian victories over the Ottoman empire in the northern Black Sea. Odessa emerged as the primary export hub for grain from Polish Ukraine, replacing the earlier Baltic routes, while New Orleans, strategically located on the delta in the Gulf of Mexico, at first thrived on flour exports from the Old Northwest.Footnote 6 Both ports rapidly developed into major urban centres as the United States and the Russian empire gained geopolitical prominence, each playing a pivotal role in the economic and demographic trajectories of these rising continental powers. By the 1840s, New Orleans had emerged as the United States’ premier port, initially focused on provisions until southern staple exports took precedence in the 1850s. Similarly, Odessa became a vital centre, with over 50 per cent of Russia’s grain exports passing through its port – a trade that accounted for nearly one third of all Russian exports. Technological and legal advances, such as the introduction of steam navigation on the Mississippi and the granting of free-port status to Odessa, accelerated commercial growth in both cities. These developments also acted as powerful demographic magnets, drawing increasing numbers of migrant workers and sailors to these growing southern ports. At the urban level, both cities boasted uniquely diverse populations within their respective national contexts. Transitioning from frontier outposts to bustling trade hubs, the nineteenth-century urban development of Odessa and New Orleans presented infrastructural and political challenges, epitomizing the quick transformation of border towns into capitals of trade and empire.
This article aims therefore to understand the parallels and similarities in the concurrent development of two southern metropolises that emerged as bridgeheads in a growing global order. Positioned on the territorial edges of vast continental empires, these laboratories of the modern city faced common challenges: an uneasy expansion from initially small settlements, the fragmentation of their urban spaces and the co-existence of diverse populations. Rather than providing an integral comparison of New Orleans and Odessa from a commercial standpoint, my goal is to investigate how social and environmental vulnerabilities impacted the management of urban diversity, underscoring the significance of local conditions in shaping each city’s evolution as a global and cosmopolitan port.
Urban modernity?
Upon arriving for the first time in New Orleans or Odessa, newcomers often anticipated vibrant cities that had blossomed from what were once mere territorial confines. However, they were frequently taken aback by the stark contrasts they encountered, which juxtaposed commercial prosperity and tales of cosmopolitanism with entrenched poverty and social inequalities. In the mid-1840s, French tourists leaving Odessa’s quarantine facility questioned whether they were truly in the same city that had appeared ‘so brilliant when [they] saw it from the lazaret, and which now presented itself to [their] eyes under so mean and wretched an aspect’. On a different shore, a New Orleans physician expressed similar sentiments, observing that while travellers initially marvelled at the grand houses along the Mississippi, after entering the city they soon encountered ‘many others whose construction and roofs show a [surprising] depth of poverty’.Footnote 7 In New Orleans and Odessa alike, colonial societies had to grapple with a blend of geographical and economic opportunities alongside distinct limitations. The rapid growth of the port cities was driven largely by foreign immigration, resulting in a staggering tenfold population increase in less than two generations.Footnote 8 Yet, while human settlement advanced quickly, a slower but equally impactful geographic tempo – marked by climate and environmental conditions – shaped the early histories of Odessa and New Orleans. As these towns transformed into bustling cities, they became arenas for social divisions, in turn highlighting the unequal impacts of rapid economic growth and the volatile nature of their southern climates. For the purposes of this article, ‘environment’ will refer specifically to the ecological conditions that directly affected the urban development in New Orleans and Odessa, excluding the broader hinterland and the regions supplying or receiving goods that moved through their ports.
New Orleans was situated at the southernmost point along the Mississippi River where a significant settlement could be established. This location required the regular modification and engineering of the river’s deltaic landscape as the city expanded, emphasizing the fugitive character of urban growth. By contrast, Odessa developed on arid and windswept steppes rather than marshy swamps. Perched atop limestone cliffs overlooking the Black Sea, the city’s natural harbour site was not situated on one of Ukraine’s main waterways – the Dniepr, Dniestr and Bug rivers – and lacked natural springs. In both southern Louisiana and steppe Ukraine, ecological conditions challenged human settlement, leading to increased demands on limited resources, particularly land and fresh water. New Orleans experienced frequent and deadly flooding episodes, bringing diseases in while altering the city’s layout. Meanwhile, Odessa, built to serve its seaport, struggled with the management of a growing population and the needs of its commercial activities, straining freshwater supplies. Recurring droughts, dust storms and failed forage operations further shaped its early history. Despite their commercial advantages, the waterborne locations and urban layouts of Odessa and New Orleans stressed infrastructural weaknesses and exposed residents to endemic and epidemic hazards. The urban growth of these port cities in the first half of the nineteenth century provided early examples of rapid urbanization in both the United States and the Russian empire, and in their cases this process was driven primarily by trade in agricultural commodities rather than in industry as would be the case later.
Odessa’s rapid development, owing to its strategic location on the Black Sea, was met with the daunting task of securing adequate water for consumption. Contemporary accounts described Odessa as lacking ‘the most indispensable necessaries of life’: chief among them was freshwater supplies. To address this shortfall, foreign experts were recruited to locate artesian wells, but the city’s elevated site – 200 feet above sea level – made successful drilling nearly impossible.Footnote 9 The nearest springs were located several kilometres from the town centre and ‘guarded as treasures’, making water transport challenging and the profession of water carrier lucrative, as the frequent mud and snow slush made street access difficult. Local historian, Apollon A. Skalkovsky, observed that in 1839 water trade had become an entire branch of urban and suburban industry, generating incomes as high as 1,000 rubles annually.Footnote 10 By the late 1860s, private entrepreneurs controlled hundreds of wells, monopolizing water resources and driving prices higher. As a result, residents resorted to rooftop cisterns for collecting rainwater, which was often of questionable quality and contributed to infectious disease outbreaks, particularly cholera starting in 1831.Footnote 11 Clean water was only reliably provided with the construction of a canal to the Dniester River by the Odessa Waterworks Company, completed in 1873. However, this infrastructural improvement had a limited impact, as the city’s rapid population growth exacerbated persistent issues, including severe dust in summer, mud in winter and inadequate sewage disposal.Footnote 12 While Odessa’s sanitation problems were typical of large urban centres during this period, William Gleason highlights that ‘insufficient or non-existent water and sewage systems’ were a common feature linking Russian cities to the West. These unsanitary conditions were characteristic of urban modernity, with Odessa’s lack of reliable fresh water and the clustering of residents around water sources closely paralleling some of the issues highlighted in Lucia Carminati’s contribution to this special issue, focusing on Port Saïd, where elementary sanitary measures were poorly enforced before 1900. Odessa, however, differed in that its demographic and urban expansion preceded broader waves of industrial urbanization elsewhere, as well as within the Russian empire. The southern port could arguably be seen as a possible forerunner to Russia and Ukraine’s modern cities.Footnote 13
While on the arid Black Sea steppes water scarcity was a dominant concern, it was water abundance that posed challenges on the banks of the Mississippi River, chiefly because New Orleans developed in an alluvial plain below river level. The city was often referred to as ‘Orleans Island’ (Île d’Orléans), because it was surrounded more by water than by land. Until 1803, the urban population remained modest, with around 8,000 residents. However, within ten years of the Louisiana Purchase, it more than doubled, driven by the onset of American rule and a sudden influx of refugees from the Caribbean, recently arrived from Haiti after a transit in Cuba. This rapid demographic growth intensified pressure on the existing city grid. The development of American New Orleans into a larger city strained the natural site of a previously modest colonial town and ushered in the extension of levees. Concerns arose over limited space for safe neighbourhood expansion, as ‘the whole city [was] upon almost a dead level’, making building a town ‘no easy matter, one would think’.Footnote 14
In contrast to Odessa’s water scarcity, New Orleans grappled with the ominous challenges posed by water’s profusion. The mighty Mississippi River and its shifting delta subjected the city to repeated disasters with bank erosion, spring floods and autumn tropical storms setting the stage for such deadly episodes. Despite being a source of commercial prosperity and ascendency, the river was a constant threat, leading residents to fear that it might ‘someday take the matter into her own hands’.Footnote 15 The development of new neighbourhoods to cope with demographic growth was significantly influenced by this omnipresent aquatic environment. Initially, Anglo-American newcomers constructed traditional East Coast-style houses, but they soon adapted to local ecological constraints, erecting taller structures that were built in higher density and on elevated terrain. Water not only surrounded but also infiltrated the city’s foundations: no cellars were dug within the city, and cemeteries featured raised graves.
New Orleans, much like Odessa, grappled with water management issues that were intertwined with sanitary challenges and heavily influenced power dynamics within the city. An extensive flood episode in the early 1800s left New Orleans’ streets cluttered with rotten fish, causing the death of up to 3,000 residents. Overall, between 1796 and 1812, the city also endured eight yellow fever epidemics, nearly one every other year.Footnote 16 Seasonal floods during the rainy months coincided with the summer heat, while rapid urban growth accelerated land clearing: the combination of these factors fostered the creation of prime breeding spots for mosquitoes and facilitated the spread of yellow fever. This disease disproportionately killed the city’s vulnerable and transient populations of refugees, immigrants and newly arrived enslaved people. Despite this health crisis, city leadership often resisted implementing federally administered quarantines, unlike other American ports that enforced strict quarantines and frequently refused goods coming from New Orleans.Footnote 17 Historian Kathryn Olivarius argues that local officials, predominantly white survivors of previous epidemics, cynically prioritized acclimation over disease prevention, imposing fines, fees and taxes on new, non-immune residents and thereby profiting from what she calls ‘immuno-capital’. This concept reflects how ethnicity and the ability to survive environmental hazards shaped power dynamics and social hierarchies in New Orleans.Footnote 18
Quarantine regulations and diseases were also significant features of Odessa’s urban life. The city’s primary vector-bone illnesses were malaria, plague and typhus. Urban expansion in Odessa involved draining nearby marshes, which reduced mosquito breeding areas and mitigated malarial outbreaks – unlike New Orleans, where land clearing had the opposite effect. However, as a port city, Odessa’s grain silos often hosted large populations of rats carrying fleas and incoming ships exposed the city to infections coming from abroad, in particular plague.Footnote 19 In 1812, an epidemic left 4,038 people infected and 2,632 dead out of a population of 20,000, marking one of the city’s foundational hardships. The frequency of such devastating epidemics led to the establishment of a mandatory quarantine lasting 30 to 40 days for all merchants and visitors at Odessa’s new lazaret.Footnote 20 The city authorities’ response differed from that of New Orleans, as infectious outbreaks significantly hindered trade in the city, leading to conflicts with local merchant guilds that demanded the relaxation of quarantine restrictions.Footnote 21 In response to high urban mortality rates, Odessa’s government initiated infrastructural improvements such as modern hospital facilities, water infrastructure and sewage systems later in the century.Footnote 22 These measures proved successful in the long run: Patricia Herlihy notes that by the end of the nineteenth century, Odessa’s death rate was lower than that of Moscow, St Petersburg and several other European cities including Liverpool, Manchester and Budapest.Footnote 23
Comparing how the environmental histories of Odessa and New Orleans impacted life and death in these port cities provides insights into the contingent making of urban modernity. Both cities, with relatively new urban centres, contended with the challenges of fast urbanization, demographic growth and the stakes of population renewal. Situated on the geographical edges of large continental empires, these emerging southern ports exemplified the consequences of both effective and ineffective governance, blurring the delineation between autocratic and democratic regimes. The precarious and unstable nature of their urban space challenges simplistic narratives of geographic determinism and inevitable commercial success, highlighting instead the role of contingent events and factors. Local conditions created enduring path dependencies, merging natural and built environments and straining the urban fabric of Odessa and New Orleans. Ultimately, the interplay between natural ecologies and human-made infrastructures was translated onto social inequalities in these cities, deeply affecting social cohesion and fragmentation in these southern ports.
Negotiating urban diversity
The interplay of environmental constraints and broader political decisions was central to shaping the urban development of New Orleans and Odessa. These factors framed the cities’ growth, a growth itself sustained by the presence of diverse populations of foreigners and internal migrants, essential in influencing the commercial activities and cosmopolitan character of the ports. Negotiating urban diversity was not just about addressing ethicized and racialized socio-economic divides; in the case of Odessa and New Orleans, it also involved understanding how environmental vulnerability amplified urban inequalities. Water and waste management preoccupied planners, municipal authorities and public health officials, with these policies becoming deeply entwined with the challenge of accommodating the ports’ growing populations.
In the densely populated settings of Odessa and New Orleans, communities were formed and differences were defended.Footnote 24 Alongside this co-existence lay prejudices and violence against outside groups, raising questions about how inequalities are amplified by environmental vulnerability. If cosmopolitanism is inherently produced by urban settings, then the convergence of natural and built environments further shaped their existing social fabric. Crucially, the relatively new founding of New Orleans and Odessa – established in the early and late eighteenth centuries, respectively – meant that these rapidly evolving urban landscapes had to contend with multiple and sometimes conflicting expressions of cosmopolitanism in their midst.
The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of social experimentation in both port cities, as competing models of urban co-existence vied for influence. In New Orleans, this era marked the transition from a colonial settlement to the emergence of an American city, a process spanning multiple generations that restructured previous social hierarchies and divisions. Similarly, Odessa’s ascent as a Russian imperial port was challenged by the diverse attributes of its local society, whose priorities sometimes diverged from those of state officials. In both cities, the expansion of capitalist economic practices drove trade and urban growth, enabling the rise of a substantial middle class and strengthening the private sector. Elevated to economic prominence through their ports, New Orleans and Odessa drew the attention of their northern political centres southward, bringing to the fore an urban diversity that, while not uncommon in urban settings, was perceived as a unique characteristic of their peripheral and maritime locations.Footnote 25 Against the imperial backdrop of New Orleans and Odessa, both forged by colonial conquests and commercial enterprise, cosmopolitanism emerged not just as idealized co-existence but was also shaped by complex alliances and cautious interactions among the port cities’ residents, where individuals safeguarded their interests amid social instability and urban inequalities.Footnote 26
Before delving into the practices and spaces of cosmopolitanism, it is essential to understand what urban diversity meant in nineteenth-century New Orleans and Odessa. As the principal city of a former European colony, New Orleans was primarily settled by ‘Louisiana Creoles’, who hailed from French, Spanish and West African origins. Following the United States’ purchase of Louisiana in 1803, the urban population increased significantly when Anglo-American settlers arrived in large numbers, many of them Southerners, both fascinated and wary of the populations they encountered in the Mississippi port.Footnote 27 The landing of over 10,000 refugees from St Domingue in 1809 further altered New Orleans’ demographic landscape and introduced a substantial Afro-Catholic and Francophone population. Later waves of immigration from Europe, particularly from Ireland and German states starting in the 1820s, further reshaped the city’s ethnic, linguistic and religious composition. By 1850, only 53 per cent of New Orleans’ population was native to the United States, with the remaining 47 per cent being foreign-born. Among the US-born population, the majority were local Louisianians, while only 17 per cent came from outside the state, indicating limited internal migration within the United States. The majority of immigrants to New Orleans originated from abroad, with the three largest foreign-born groups being Irish (21 per cent) German (12 per cent) and French (6 per cent) by 1850.Footnote 28
Odessa experienced comparably high rates of demographic growth, with a substantial input of foreign settlers rather than internal migrants. Originally a fishing village of about 2,000 residents in 1795, the city’s population surged to approximately 8,000 by 1803 and reached 25,000 in 1814, mirroring the demographic expansion observed in New Orleans. By the end of the Crimean War, Odessa had become the third-largest city in the Russian empire, boasting a population exceeding 100,000 inhabitants. Italians and Greeks were among the city’s earliest settlers, drawn by opportunities to establish commercial ventures and access trade routes in a newly reopened Black Sea region. Odessa’s inclusion in the ‘Pale of Settlement’ – a designated area in European parts of Russia where Jews were allowed to reside – led to significant migration from within the Pale, with many Jewish families settling in Odessa.Footnote 29 Other early residents included Poles seeking to trade grain from their estates, and Frenchmen in exile during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Additionally, several ethnic and linguistic groups associated with the Russian empire, such as Ukrainians or Moldovans, were often categorized as internal migrants, complicating efforts to assess the city’s ethnic diversity.Footnote 30 Nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, the first All-Russian Census recorded at least 50 languages other than Russian spoken in Odessa, indicating nearly 42 per cent of Odessa’s 403,815 inhabitants likely acquired Russian later in their lifetime, and could be identified as ethnically non-Russian based on their mother tongue.Footnote 31
Despite their distinct social and political contexts, there were some similarities in the physical development of Odessa and New Orleans. In both cities, the establishment of a parallel urban grid served as a tool of colonial conquest, enabling the dominance of a new space and the displacement of indigenous populations – Nogai Tatars on the Black Sea shores, and chiefly Houma, Choctaw, Chitimacha and Biloxi in the Mississippi Delta. Odessa’s original plan of 1794 was devised at the time of New Orleans’ reconstruction after a significant fire in 1788. The grids of the two cities reflected colonial town-planning principles by drawing long, symmetrical streets, incorporating public squares and small gardens – which represented eighteenth-century urban ideals.Footnote 32 Odessa’s wide, straight streets extending toward the sea not only facilitated access to the port but also improved air quality by welcoming marine breezes. Urban growth in Odessa extended southward along the elevated limestone plateau flanking the Black Sea coast, rather than northward around the marshy lagoons of the bay (Figure 1).
Odessa in 1814 and 1854: urban fragmentation around the old free-port boundary.
Top: based on ‘Map of the City of Odessa in 1814’ by the Marquis Gabriel de Castelneau, Essai sur l’histoire ancienne et moderne de la nouvelle Russie…, vol. III (Paris, 1827), p. 29; yellow circles indicate the main gates into the city. Bottom: based on Kamkin and Andreev, Military and Topographic Bureau: plan of the city of Odessa (1854), https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb40739380s; showing the former free-port boundary line in yellow and the approximate area of the Moldavanka neighbourhood in blue.
Even though New Orleans was an earlier creation, it was being rebuilt just prior to the Louisiana Purchase, and for this reason it was still a relatively new and minor city in the 1800s. The city’s expansion beyond the original French Quarter accelerated under American rule, initially due to the limited capacity of the urban grid to accommodate the growing population. The first significant extension took the form of the ‘faux bourg’ (false town) of Sainte Marie, located upriver from the planned city centre.Footnote 33 Sainte Marie, primarily English-speaking, quickly earned the informal moniker of the American Quarter. When the city expanded further upriver to the west, subsequent neighbourhoods became part of an American New Orleans populated by East Coast businessmen and generations of Irish and German immigrant workers.
However, the city’s expansion was not solely driven by the continuous influx of Anglo-Americans but also by thousands of refugees from St Domingue. A new neighbourhood emerged on the former Marigny plantation, situated directly downriver from New Orleans’ historical centre. This area attracted refugees alongside working-class European immigrants, drawn by its affordable lots and accessible credit opportunities. In contrast to the American Quarter, Faubourg Marigny welcomed free people of colour, comprising 43 per cent of its population just five years after the plantation’s partition into housing lots.Footnote 34 In subsequent decades, escalating demographic growth prompted the expansion of the city grid away from the river, reclaiming drained bayous and swamps for urban development. North of the original French Quarter, the Tremé neighbourhood emerged as a symbol of New Orleans’ distinctive tripartite society, located there in part because of an 1817 city ordinance that confined drumming to the back-of-town – another term for backswamp edge. Just outside the colonial ramparts, Congo Square became an open market and a rare Sunday gathering place for plantation and urban enslaved communities, creating a liminal space within the Americanizing geography of the city (Figure 2).Footnote 35
New Orleans’ neighbourhoods and municipalities: from 1815 to 1852.
Top: based on I. Tanesse, W. Rollinson, C. Del Vecchio and P. Maspero: plan of the city and suburbs of New Orleans: from an actual survey made in 1815 (New York, 1817). Bottom: based on H. Möllhausen, B.M. Norman and Shields & Hammond: Norman’s plan of New Orleans & environs (1845), www.loc.gov/item/98687133/.
What defined urban diversity in Odessa diverged from American understandings of race and ethnicity, and was instead entrenched in the context of Russia’s south-west expansion and the population mobility within an imperial borderland. The city’s demographic growth, primarily fuelled by commerce, attracted a significant number of foreign-born and landless populations.Footnote 36 External immigration and internal resettlement resulted in a spatial concentration of cultural and religious interactions uncommon elsewhere in the Russian empire. Unlike other regions where social rank aligned with the soslovie (social estate), Odessa’s trade activities created a substantial urban middle class, known as meshchane, whose economic interests transcended traditional estate boundaries.Footnote 37 The meshchane class, comprising over 70 per cent of Odessa’s population by 1858, dominated the city’s complex social order. They were primarily ‘semi-skilled workers, tradesmen, shopkeepers, and Russian subjects’ living along the edges of Odessa’s trading economy.Footnote 38 This predominance of the meshchane class distinguished Odessa from Moscow and St Petersburg, where the peasant class ranked first.Footnote 39
Accommodating such diversity at the city level became increasingly challenging due to the ever-more constricted urban space. Facing enduring difficulties in accessing salubrious water, residents tended to cluster around central areas near the main markets where water was delivered daily by carts, thus increasing demand for housing. This scarcity was especially acute during the high season from April to October, when an average of 10,000 seasonal workers and traders swelled the urban population. Despite initial plans for orderly expansion, improvisation and adaptability characterized Odessa’s physical growth, driven by a construction boom that was sustained by the accumulated wealth of the port. Between 1811 and 1853, Odessa’s urban growth outpaced other Russian cities, with an annual rate of 10.8 per cent, compared to 1.6 and 1.7 per cent for St Petersburg and Moscow.Footnote 40
Unlike New Orleans, which expanded along the Mississippi River, Odessa’s urban growth was more compact, leading to a relatively integrated central urban space that did not strictly follow nationality and linguistic divides. Although central zones were socially mixed, their residents were economically comparable, predominantly middle to upper class, while the suburbs were more ethnically homogeneous with a segregated, lower-income population located beyond the free-port boundary.Footnote 41 Overall, spatial constraints resulted in a denser city, with the clustering of Odessa’s population fostering cosmopolitan social interactions over time. Although some streets and neighbourhoods were named after specific ethnic groups, residents often defied straightforward categorization.Footnote 42 The port city’s tolerance for diverse devotional centres and its lack of a ghetto meant that its large Jewish population, mostly commercial and secular, did not live isolated from the rest of the city.
In Odessa and New Orleans, cosmopolitanism arose from the practical negotiation of urban diversity, which was in turn influenced by the spatial and environmental constraints of these growing ports. The trading elites of both cities benefited from commercial exchanges that connected them to extensive colonial and transnational networks. Their wealth visibly influenced the recognizably cosmopolitan architecture of Odessa’s and New Orleans’ landmark buildings. This urban cosmopolitanism was also marked by consumerism, civic performance and adaptable notions of citizenship. At the same time, thousands of newcomers arrived each year to swell the ports’ urban poor, whose own cosmopolitan practices – driven by necessity rather than emulation – often involved an alteration or loss of language and identity.Footnote 43 Amid contrasting geopolitical contexts, the nineteenth-century urbanization of Odessa and New Orleans, spurred by access to global trade routes, new immigration streams and distinct ecological constraints, resulted in a new city-centred geography that stood apart from the influence of the state. Yet, as sites of colonial authority where imperial powers imposed strict socio-political hierarchies, the cosmopolitanism that flourished on their streets remained inherently fragmented.
Fragmented cosmopolitanism
The interplay between social and environmental factors in the urban growth of Odessa and New Orleans amplified tensions and fractures that ran parallel to the daily interactions of their diverse populations. It made evident the complex nature of their cosmopolitan practices. This urban assemblage encompassed both co-existence and conflict, with New Orleans marked by the brutal violence of the slave trade and Odessa by the eruption of deadly pogroms. While some aspects of city life – such as residential cohabitation and occupational mingling – could be vectors of inter-ethnic integration, others drove social fragmentation. Rapid demographic growth heightened individual anonymity, while at the same time physical severance from one’s homeland enabled the emergence of a more cosmopolitan identity as new communities arose on the basis of a shared language, religion, ethnicity and common interests.
Both cities were not only immigrant hubs but also refuges for sizeable fugitive populations: New Orleans’ waterfront served as a nexus for African American resistance and escape from slavery, while Odessa regularly harboured runaway serfs from the central regions of Russia.Footnote 44 Some neighbourhoods developed beyond the colonial core, hosting the port cities’ poorer and more culturally mixed populations, situating Odessa and New Orleans within a broader history of fragmented urban environments. Such cities illustrate how marginal spaces persisted even as former boundaries transformed, which fostered creolized forms of cosmopolitanism in peripheral urban areas. This fragmented cosmopolitanism underscores the multiple, often conflicting, forms of co-existence, revealing spaces that simultaneously bound urban populations together while highlighting both informal and formally imposed divisions. The remainder of this article will focus on two specific cases of cosmopolitan fragmentation: Odessa’s Moldavanka neighbourhood and the Third Municipality of New Orleans.
The urban fabric of Odessa weaved together places of exchange and demarcation, notably marked by the customs barrier that symbolically separated the city from the interior of the Russian empire. Odessa’s city plan of 1814, devised by François de Castelnau, confined the city within the free-port zone, restricting suburban growth and isolating the inner neighbourhoods. The 40-year porto franco status fostered urban development within this delimited space, transforming the city while curbing its urban sprawl.Footnote 45 The former boundaries of the free-port area continued to act as an informal demarcation line between the strict geometry of the city centre and the organically expanding outer areas, characterized by denser, narrower streets. Moldavanka, a rural settlement south-west of the old centre – that pre-existed the city’s founding – grew beyond the free-port boundary, leading to its perception as a space somewhat detached from the harbour’s activities and lacking the cosmopolitan virtues associated with the city.Footnote 46 Crucially, few streets from central Odessa directly connected to Moldavanka, and those that did often had different names upon reaching the neighbourhood. Despite later annexation as a suburb during the city’s expansion, Moldavanka never fully integrated into the urban core and remained one of Odessa’s most impoverished districts in stark contrast to the more affluent central areas. At the same time, it was one of the neighbourhoods that saw the fastest population growth.Footnote 47
In her analysis of Odessa’s pre-revolutionary popular press, Roshanna P. Sylvester examines how concepts of criminality and respectability were mapped onto the cityscape.Footnote 48 Moldavanka emerged as a focal point in civic discourse, with contemporary journalists frequently constructing the old free-port limits as Odessa’s major cultural fault line (Figure 1). Because Moldavanka once lay outside the boundaries of the porto franco, some villagers likely profited from illegal trade opportunities – a reputation that lingered even after the neighbourhood’s incorporation into the city. Like many port cities, Odessa was home to significant criminal activities, partly fuelled by the free-port line, which encouraged smuggling through the city’s sprawling catacombs. These underground tunnels gave Odessa’s reputation for social disorder an unusual spatial dimension, as the existence of these covert passages suggested that the city’s perceived instability stemmed not only from social dynamics but also from hidden spaces beneath the surface.
This division, both mental and physical, ostensibly reflected class distinctions: one side embodied the safe and morally upright world of Odessa’s middle class of traders and entrepreneurs, while the other portrayed the dangerous, criminal underworld of lower-class Moldavanka. In both newspapers and novels, depictions of unruly violence at Moldavanka’s flea market and on its streets heightened the neighbourhood’s sense of otherness, framing it as a foreign territory or, as Sylvester describes, ‘a place to be explored by an intrepid urban traveller’. This exoticized portrayal bears similarities to descriptions of New Orleans’ Creole neighbourhoods, often characterized by their alleged promiscuity and lack of safety.Footnote 49
The fragmented cosmopolitanism of Odessa, characterized by an inner-city middle-class and rapidly expanding lower-class suburbs, raises questions about the motives and potential benefits behind the negative portrayal of Moldavanka residents. Given the neighbourhood’s predominantly Jewish population, it is plausible that antisemitic prejudice influenced these descriptions, escalating into violent pogroms in the 1870s and 1880s, while tales of criminality provided city officials and police forces with opportunities to assert their authority under the guise of maintaining social order. However, as noted by Sylvester, the psychological separation of Moldavanka from Odessa’s polite, cosmopolitan spaces allowed the city to delay taking municipal responsibility for the problems and struggles of its poorer residents. The case of Moldavanka thus underscores the limits of cosmopolitanism in nineteenth-century Odessa, while bringing to the fore the mingling practices of its less privileged residents. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that until the 1860s, Odessa demonstrated greater social integration than other parts of the Russian empire, challenging imperial segregation policies and displaying a form of positive urban detachment from exclusivist imperial networks.Footnote 50
Dominant narratives of cosmopolitan mingling thus became refracted in Odessa through the transformation of one neighbourhood into an enclave. Similarly, the urban landscape of antebellum New Orleans remained in flux, underscoring the uneven dynamics of integration and assimilation brought about by American rule. While ethnic and racial segregation characterized many southern cities, New Orleans stood out due to its unique patterns of residential fragmentation.Footnote 51 Economic disparities and class divisions, often tied to differences in language and religion, framed the city’s early urban landscape, at times challenging conventional paradigms. Here, residential arrangements were shaped not only by the combination of race and class but also by overlapping social institutions and associations. Critically, the term ‘Creole’ encompassed a broad and fluid identity, which contrasted with the Americanness of English-speaking newcomers. This dichotomy formed the foundation for spatial divisions within the city.
The rivalry between ‘colonial’ Creoles and Americans in nineteenth-century New Orleans, which superficially centred on differences between Latin-Catholic culture and Protestantism, masked the deeper conflicts that permeated the city. Within the context of Louisiana’s slave society, power dynamics between enslaved individuals and slaveowners, as well as between free people of colour and white settlers, intersected with cultural, linguistic and religious affiliations. By the 1820s, calls advocating for the city’s division were commonplace, with Canal Street serving as an informal boundary between American and Creole districts. With the urban population approaching 100,000 in 1836, residential clustering became a major political issue, leading to the subdivision of New Orleans into three semi-independent municipalities (Figure 2).Footnote 52
This division not only reflected existing cultural divides but also represented a political struggle over the governance of the city’s institutions. The former neighbourhoods and faubourgs were reorganized into ‘municipalities’, each governed by its own board of elected aldermen responsible for local affairs, taxation and infrastructure maintenance. These boards reported to an annual General Council, mirroring the federal government structure. The three municipalities corresponded to the French Quarter and Tremé (First Municipality), Faubourg Sainte Marie (Second Municipality), and Marigny estates (Third Municipality). The spaces between them were humorously referred to as ‘neutral ground’, a term still used in New Orleans to denote median spaces. This urban division tripled bureaucratic workload and gradually favoured resource allocation to wealthier municipalities, leading to noticeable disparities in infrastructure and economic health, particularly exacerbated by the financial Panic of 1837.Footnote 53
The First Municipality of New Orleans, predominantly Catholic, was home to a diverse population including Black and white Creoles, Caribbean and Latin American immigrants and foreign French, collectively referred to as ‘the Creoles’. They shared similar professional occupations, with the majority working in governmental, legal and medical roles rather than trade. This departure from pre-1800 Creole society, which had been dominated by a colonial mercantile class, was a consequence of the arrival of Antillean Creoles after 1803, who were formerly elite landowners in St Domingue. They came to New Orleans impoverished and unable to purchase land in Louisiana, yet dismissed trade as an undignified occupation. Their aversion to commerce allowed Anglo-Americans and subsequent migrant groups to take control of the commercial sector and gain social and political prominence.Footnote 54 This rise was particularly pronounced in the Second Municipality, which experienced especially rapid growth, driven by trade and a predominantly American population. Situated upriver from the original settlement, this district also benefited from its higher elevation and broader natural levee, which provided cleaner water free from the sewage and debris of the inner city. These healthier conditions reduced disease risk, further accelerating the area’s economic expansion.
While the First and Second Municipalities benefited from prime land and a robust economy, the Third Municipality, disparagingly known as the ‘Poor Third’, struggled with poverty and a lack of infrastructure.Footnote 55 The municipal division deepened the isolation of Marigny’s diverse population, where material poverty undercut its cultural wealth. The neighbourhood, now semi-autonomous, faced chronic issues such as hazardous roads and inadequate drainage, particularly devastating during floods. Without unified city services, stark disparities emerged between the municipalities, further degrading the overall quality of life within the Third Municipality. Adding to its reputation for hardship and poor health was widespread anti-immigrant sentiment, fuelled by the Third Municipality’s predominantly Creole and immigrant residents. This lower-class neighbourhood, mainly populated by Latin Catholic immigrants and Black New Orleanians, was closer to environmental hazards. Urban planners repeatedly postponed essential drainage and infrastructure projects for the area. This neglect led to informal living arrangements that often transcended traditional social divides, a dynamic also noted in this issue by Adrián Lerner Patrón in his observations of the precarious urbanization of the flood-prone Bélen neighbourhood in Iquitos.
Inferior infrastructure contributed to high death rates in the Third Municipality, which contemporary newspapers blamed on ‘unacclimated foreigners…without trades and without capital’, who were labelled as the primary ‘victims and propagators’ of the city’s recurring epidemics. Immigrants, including Irish and German labourers who settled in the outskirts of both the Third Municipality and the adjacent city of Lafayette, were often stigmatized as criminals, accused of overcrowding courts and jails, and blamed for prompting an ‘oppressive system of taxation’. This stance justified withholding social support from impoverished neighbourhoods rather than understanding the cause of poverty – a rationale that echoes the treatment of Moldavanka in Odessa.Footnote 56 All through the era of semi-autonomous municipal governance, only the Second Municipality achieved economic prosperity, while the administrative fragmentation weakened New Orleans’ overall economy and ultimately contributed to citywide impoverishment.
The growing dissonance between the municipalities heightened tensions and raised fears that the divided urban landscape would spark a potential ‘war of races’.Footnote 57 The fiscal strain caused by the municipal system plunged New Orleans into significant debt, leading the state legislature to repeal the division in 1852 to restore unity to the city. However, after 16 years apart, the societal equilibrium and power dynamics among the distinct groups had undergone substantial transformation. Upon reunification, the city expanded to include Lafayette, an upriver faubourg in Jefferson Parish, altering the demographic balance even further with a denser population of Anglo-American, German and Irish workers sharing either language or Protestant faith. This shift favoured the ‘Americans’, who became the largest demographic group in the culturally divided city with increased political influence as their economic and spatial presence expanded. The upriver extension of New Orleans saw the emergence of American-style Greek revival mansions, while the downriver Creole faubourgs struggled economically and infrastructurally, and grappled with legacies inherited from the municipal era.
The urban fragmentation of New Orleans and Odessa stresses how cosmopolitan practices – mediated by race, class and religion – were also deeply influenced by the cities’ distinct environmental and social landscapes. This fragmentation fostered divergent and sometimes overlapping forms of co-existence, with local ecological conditions shaping the residents’ livelihoods and interactions as much as the emerging global networks of trade and migration.
Conclusions
This comparative study of two port cities that shared similar patterns of growth in the early nineteenth century presents several methodological challenges. Among these are inconsistencies in categorization and data, as well as the risk of obscuring each place’s unique characteristics, potentially leading to uneven results.Footnote 58 When examining cities situated in distinctly different geographical regions and political contexts, divergent factors can easily conceal shared traits; however, this does not preclude a productive analysis. Rather than focusing on maritime histories or commercial competition – such as the ports’ shared role in the grain and provision trade – this article has sought to understand the development of these cities through the lens of socio-environmental vulnerability. While the parallel growth of New Orleans and Odessa in the nineteenth century undeniably reflects broad processes of globalization, the specific urban orders they developed were shaped by decisions driven by public health concerns and localized responses to ecological conditions.
In both Odessa and New Orleans, the interaction of the built environment with water – whether through its scarcity, abundance or its function as a communication route – prompted local authorities to develop measures for population control and regulation. Access to fresh water, as well as protection from its sanitary hazards, significantly shaped social hierarchies and inequalities. In the long term, water influenced which areas of the city became more or less valued, with enduring implications for their residents, a legacy demonstrated at times tragically as was the case in the devastation of New Orleans’ downriver wards by Hurricane Katrina. Focusing on water and disease as factors of social fragmentation allows for viewing the city as both an ecosystem and a social construct, formed through the interaction between built environments and ecological circumstances. In this context, the concept of cosmopolitanism, often evoked in the early histories of Odessa and New Orleans, also warrants scrutiny, particularly regarding what divisions on the ground can be obscured by cosmopolitan narratives, as well as how pragmatic co-existence was fostered by each city’s socio-environmental conditions. Ultimately, this comparison positions Odessa and New Orleans not merely as port cities but as part of a broader history of how humans have navigated environmental path dependencies in urban spaces, framing the limits and possibilities of cosmopolitan life in the process.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Michael Goebel, Christian Jones, Yorim Spoelder and Xinge Zhai of the Global History Department at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, for inviting me to participate in the Patchwork Cities conference in the summer of 2022, on ‘Writing the Social History of Port Cities’. This gathering laid the basis for the article presented here. Additionally, I am deeply appreciative of the valuable insights provided by fellow contributors to this special issue. Their thorough review and constructive feedback on an earlier draft of this text, offered during a writing workshop in January 2024, were instrumental in refining its content. I am also indebted to my postdoctoral advisor at Freie Universität Berlin, Sebastian Conrad, whose support enabled me to extend my term at the institution, facilitating my involvement in this special issue. I am thankful to the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Studies, University of London for offering me a fellowship and an academic home during the revision and publication stages of this article. Lastly, I extend my gratitude to Hitesh Dhorajiwala for his meticulous final reading of the article.
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