Another practical history lesson from Richard Campanella, a geographer with the Tulane School of Architecture and a Monroe Fellow with the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, is the author of “Bienville’s Dilemma,” “Geographies of New Orleans,” and the forthcoming “Bourbon Street: A History” (2014). He may be reached through rcampane@tulane.edu or @nolacampanella on Twitter.

Until just a few years ago, each of the seven districts elected its own assessors, who staffed their own offices and assessed taxes independently — a system unique in the nation. It took civic intervention after Hurricane Katrina to finally consolidate those political redundancies.

Plantations, faubourgs, Creoles, Anglos, competition, expansion, drainage, politics, taxes: embedded in that seemingly mundane map are sundry episodes in the human geography of New Orleans, going back 200 years.

Seven