Becoming non-commensurable: synthesis, design, and the politics of urban experimentation in post-Superstorm Sandy New York

Abstract

This article uses a case study of the Rebuild by Design (RBD) program in post-Superstorm Sandy New York City to advance research into experimental urban environmental governance, notably that aiming to enhance resilience. Existing literature about experimentation tends to distinguish experimental governance from more conventional, modernist forms of environmental governance. Our technical critique of RBD’s design-based experiments in post-disaster reconstruction and urban resilience planning instead situates experimentation in the wider history of ongoing cybernetic transformations in liberal rule. We draw attention to new practices of control and regulation that do not eliminate socio-ecological difference but instead try to make such difference transparently knowable and functionally useful. As we demonstrate through an analysis of the troubled implementation of design-driven urban resilience projects in RBD, the issue for such experimentation is that the push for synthesis and solutions can deny the existence of forms of knowledge that are qualitatively, intrinsically different. In this reading, the politics of experimentation in the Anthropocene increasingly hinges on recognizing and maintaining the potential for some things and groups to be non-commensurable—that is, irreducible to resources for others’ resilience.