In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, host Douglas Stuart McDaniel traces a single day on the Mississippi Gulf Coast into an inquiry about what resilience really means — not as a buzzword, but as a lived condition. The story begins in Old Metairie, Louisiana, in a po’boy shop thick with fried shrimp, football, and loyalty — and follows a meandering road through New Orleans’ neighborhoods, past the jazz-haunted blocks of Tremé, to the rural edges of Hancock County, Mississippi. What begins as a casual weekend detour becomes a meditation on the architecture of survival — one measured not in blueprints or budgets, but in memory, humor, and faith.

At the center of the story are two structures that could not be more different: NASA’s Stennis Space Center — a fortress of concrete and control where engines are tested to withstand the violence of liftoff — and Harold and Lillian’s Bar, a battered, 79-year old roadhouse at the edge of the marsh, rebuilt again and again after hurricanes have tried to erase it. Together they frame McDaniel’s exploration of what he calls rural urbanism: the informal systems of adaptation that keep communities alive long after formal ones have failed.

The contrast becomes a kind of parable. Stennis represents engineered resilience — redundancy, hard infrastructure, the scientific will to endure. Harold and Lillian’s embodies vernacular resilience — plywood, laughter, and the quiet insistence of people who rebuild without permission. One measures in PSI; the other measures in people. Both are necessary.

Threaded through the narrative is the story of Go Home, the bar’s Newfoundland mascot — a dog who once walked patrons safely to their cars and refused to abandon the building during Hurricane Zeta. In the end, “Go Home” becomes more than a name; it’s a philosophy of place. In a region where storms reset the hierarchy with every season, home isn’t a house — it’s whatever still stands when the water recedes. Sometimes it’s a porch, a bar, a jukebox. Sometimes it’s the friend who won’t let you disappear.

By the episode’s close, the journey bends back toward Ocean Springs and the basement speakeasy of the Julep Room — buried underneath Aunt Jenny’s Catfish Parlor. A place once haunted by Elvis, it’s a final stop where bourbon, music, and memory converge. McDaniel weaves the day’s encounters into a reflection on endurance and belonging, suggesting that the true test of civilization may not be found in cities at all, but in the small, unpolished systems that hold when everything else breaks.

“Go Home” is, at its core, an essay about continuity — about how communities fold grief, humor, and myth into their own foundations. It’s a portrait of the Gulf Coast as both laboratory and metaphor, where rockets and roadhouses exist on the same continuum of faith.

The episode closes with a preview of McDaniel’s debut novel, Ashes of Empire: Ghost Emperor — a sweeping historical epic that echoes the same themes: how empires fracture, how myths survive, and how the human will to rebuild never really changes.

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, I return to my ancestral grounds of East Tennessee to explore the hidden consciousness of a river — and by extension, of every city built upon the bones of older worlds. This podcast essay traces the evolution of what was, for sometime, considered Stephen Holston’s River, and before that, the Cherokee Nvsgi (NUH-skee in the eastern band dialect)—meaning “the curved one”— and on through centuries of renaming, remapping, and reengineering, until it became the domesticated Tennessee River of the modern TVA era.

What begins as personal memoir — campfires on the Holston, my great-uncle John Alan Maxwell’s illustrations of Cherokee hunters and frontiersmen — unfolds into a meditation on how naming, mapping, and building alter not only landscapes but collective consciousness. The essay reveals that every act of development, from colonial cartography to contemporary megaprojects, is also an act of translation: an attempt to redefine what a place remembers about itself.

In a new novel I am working on, I imagine, beneath Knoxville’s polished surface, a River Serpent stirring — the buried hydrology and spiritual residue of the downstream Cherokee towns and villages of Citico, Chota, and Tanasi, drowned beneath the reservoirs of progress. It is not a monster, but the repressed memory of land and water. The river, I write, “never signed off on any of these modern politics.”

In Citizen One terms, the River Serpent represents a city’s unconscious — the underlayer of memory, grief, and adaptation that powers every visible skyline. Just as smart cities claim to sense and respond through data and networks, ancient places once did so through water, myth, ritual, and transportation. Both are systems of awareness; only some of the interfaces have changed.

This episode asks:

* What do cities forget when they rename their rivers and rearrange their histories?

* Can infrastructure be an act of amnesia as much as progress?

* And how do we recover the voice of a place when it’s been drowned by its own development?

The central line — “You can do surgery with names or you can commit a neat murder” — becomes the moral axis of the discussion. Cities, I would argue, are linguistic organisms. Every boundary, district, and zoning code is a word that can heal or wound the consciousness of the ancestors beneath it or the descendants yet to inherit it.

In connecting East Tennessee’s drowned valleys to the global arc of urban transformation, The River Serpent extends Citizen One’s central premise:

That cities are not merely built environments but living systems of cognition — layered with myth, memory, and moral consequence.

What we choose to call a river, a district, or a nation determines whether we nurture a living system or bury it under another name. The river, like the city, keeps score.