Abstract
Can we identify systematic commonalities in the ways in which cities rebuild themselves after the occurrence of natural disasters, given the unique characteristics of each catastrophe and the locale in which it occurs? According to Gotham and Greenberg’s recent publication Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans, yes we can. Gotham and Greenberg claim that a frequent focus on the uniqueness of natural disasters has obscured critical parallels and connectivities in subsequent modes of redevelopment related to an underlying logic of neoliberal, pro-market restructuring.
Crisis Cities starts from a normative concern with a recent tendency towards rebuilding commercial and touristic cities in New York after 9/11 and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina while neglecting the redevelopment of homes, businesses and neighbourhoods. Explaining the use of recovery funds for rebuilding already well-off districts while neglecting poorer neighbourhoods is hence the central project underlying Crisis Cities.
The book’s main empirical finding is an observed tendency for post-disaster development to exacerbate existing social inequalities rather than creating a blank state. This claim derives from a matched-pair comparison of two neighbourhoods in each city: While the poor neighbourhoods in New Orleans and New York declined significantly after the occurrence of the two disasters, the affluent neighbourhoods made considerable gains in population and wealth development.
Consequently, Crisis Cities is centrally concerned with uneven urban development: ‘unequal patterns of metropolitan growth that reproduce racial and class-based inequalities and segregation, inner-city disinvestment, suburban sprawl, interurban competition for investment, and disparities both within and between cities’ (p. 14). Gotham and Greenberg present the concept of crisis driven urbanisation to describe a tendency to use ‘crisis’ to further radical policy projects that would be much more difficult to pursue during times of ‘normal politics’. The authors see New York City and New Orleans as paradigm cases of a process of ‘concatenated crises’ (p. 240) – these two cities are representative of a broader trend towards uneven urban development around the world. Central to the argument is the book’s contingent understanding of neoliberalism: ‘Because neoliberalisation processes play out unevenly across places and scales and in reaction to distinct events, what we need are context-sensitive inquiries into these dynamics in different cities and historical periods’ (p. 15). In this context, natural disasters fulfil the function of creating new fronts for neoliberalisation, so the argument goes.
There are at least three ways in which we can appreciate Crisis Cities as a piece of scholarship. Firstly, it relies on an impressive range of high-quality empirical material: The authors draw on a wide-ranging selection of interview materials, government data and various secondary accounts of redevelopment in New York and New Orleans. Their research methodology thus stands in the best of ethnographic traditions: Closeness to research subjects combined with high attention to local specifics.
Secondly, Gotham and Greenberg improve on existing scholarship on post-disaster recovery and ‘crisis capitalism’ (Klein, 2007) in at least three ways: First, they take a historical perspective to trace the development of social disadvantages over time by arguing that relatively brief periods of disaster can lock certain neighbourhoods into a long-term development pattern. Second, by pointing towards commonalities among the two cities, Crisis Cities encourages us to go beyond single case studies of post-disaster development by thinking in terms of commonalities and interconnectedness. Third, Gotham and Greenberg encourage a social-constructivist reading of disasters as ‘processes that unfold over time, are contested politically, and interact with local socio-spatial conditions’ (p. 93). They argue that the social context is decisive in whether the occurrence of a natural disaster is framed in crisis terms, which includes such fundamental questions as what one actually considers the zone of disaster to be.
Thirdly, Crisis Cities demonstrates a high attention to the choice of scale from which one observes social processes when arguing that common perspectives of urban resilience should be disaggregated from the urban to the neighbourhood level: What may appear as a picture of increasing resilience on the city level may actually be the result of a highly unequal dynamic in which some neighbourhoods make considerable progress while others become increasingly vulnerable to future disasters.
On the other hand, there are at least four ways in which we should take the findings of Crisis Cities with a grain of salt: To begin with, a critical reader may have certain concerns regarding case selection: First of all, the argument that 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina represent ‘a “neoliberal”, or free-market oriented approach to post-disaster redevelopment that is increasingly dominant for crisis-stricken urban regions around the country and the world’ (p. ix) is certainly a very bold claim to make based on a study consisting of merely two cases. Furthermore, selecting two negative examples of post-disaster redevelopment has prevented the authors from contributing to the development of alternatives to the (allegedly) dominant mode of neoliberal restructuring. Consequently, while Crisis Cities may develop a strong critique of existing policy approaches, it offers little concerning more reform-oriented findings.
Second, while the authors note that periods of disaster can create either an opening for reimagining a city or for reinforcing existing social inequalities, they never theorise the necessary conditions for either outcome to happen. Crisis Cities puts a heavy emphasis on the latter while only casually mentioning the former.
Third, there are certain methodological concerns one may have with respect to the authors’ comparative approach: Crisis Cities uses Tilly’s ideas about encompassing comparison as a justification for comparing such distinct disasters as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Encompassing comparison relies on the idea of selecting ‘locations within [a large] structure or process and explain[ing] similarities or differences among those locations as consequences of their relationships to the whole’ (Tilly, 1984: 123). The methodological lacuna here is that certain theoretical preconceptions about the ‘whole’ become a necessary precondition for comparative case analysis. Consequently, the authors should have addressed the methodological concern that it might be that they find neoliberal connectivities between their two cases only because they presume a neoliberal logic in the first place.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there are inherent limits to the explanatory power of pro-market, privatised, neoliberal ideology and policies. For instance, one could point out that certain development tendencies in the two cities, such as a favourable stance towards touristic re-development in New Orleans, are historically speaking not confined to the period of neoliberalism starting in the 1970s. Moreover, it is surprising that while the authors draw links in their theoretical chapter to a broad framework of literature including concepts such as Agamben’s ‘state of exception’, Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ and Goffman’s ‘mental frames’, they limit themselves in their subsequent comparative account to a focus on neoliberal connectivities. Therefore, while their social-constructivist approach to crisis management is laudable, the authors remain limited to the social context of ‘market-oriented or “neoliberal” urbanization’ (p. 224). Consequently, the authors did not succeed in clearly distancing themselves from the explanatory risks involved in accounts written along the lines of ‘neoliberalism did it all over again’.
In conclusion, Crisis Cities is a very valuable academic contribution to studies of post-disaster rebuilding. It encourages the reader to ask the important normative question ‘recovery for whom?’. The book builds an important bridge between critical urban and geographical theory and literature on disaster. It adds important empirical material to earlier accounts on ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein, 2007) by taking into consideration the historical development of social disadvantages. However, there are serious concerns one may have about this work’s sole focus on a neoliberal market-logic as the only explanatory game in town.