Development, Responsibility, and the Creation of Urban Hazard Risk

Timothy J Haney

doi:10.1177/15356841211046265

Abstract

Scholarly attention has recently shifted to the creation and redevelopment of urban hazardscapes. This body of work demonstrates how housing is deployed in close proximity to hazards, and how the attendant risks have been communicated—or not—to potential residents. Utilizing the case of Calgary, Alberta, this article uses interview data collected from flood-impacted residents, and looks at their perceptions of development and risk creation. The analyses focus on how people attribute responsibility for development in flood-prone areas, and their views on future development in these areas. Results reveal that many residents argued for more government regulations preventing new development in floodplains. Moreover, they viewed developers as narrow-interested capitalists who fail to protect public safety and work to conceal risk from the public. Others wished to see large structural mitigation projects—dams, levees, or floodwalls—or insisted that homebuyers be informed of flood risk prior to purchase. The article concludes by addressing the implications for scholarly work in urban sociology, environmental sociology, and the sociology of disaster—all of which grapple with tensions between place-making and risk creation.

Highlights

The new neighborhood of Riverstone, in Calgary, Alberta boasts on its website that the community is “surrounded by 360 acres of environmental reserve” with “lots backing onto greenspace and Fish Creek Park” (Calbridge Homes 2019)
To add this missing piece, this article applies a theoretical framework drawn from the political economy of place-making, urban development, and risk, to answer several questions: How do residents living in floodprone areas attribute responsibility for creation of risk and protection from flooding? How do residents view developers and the municipal government? Does experiencing a disaster prompt flood-prone residents to ask for more regulation of the development and home-building industry? Do residents favor requirements that real estate agents and/or developers disclose a home’s location in a flood-prone area to potential buyers? to what extent do they prefer structural mitigation efforts?
How do flood-prone residents, having recently been through a flood event, view responsibility for risk creation and mitigation; what strategies of risk mitigation do they prefer? To get at the dynamics discussed above, the present study focuses on a neoliberal city, where flood risks have been systematically produced over time, and where this risk has recently resulted in catastrophic urban flood events

Summary

Introduction

The new neighborhood of Riverstone, in Calgary, Alberta boasts on its website that the community is “surrounded by 360 acres of environmental reserve” with “lots backing onto greenspace and Fish Creek Park” (Calbridge Homes 2019). Thanks to twenty-first-century flood mitigation, “your family can safely enjoy all the advantages of living beside the beautiful Bow River yearround, without concerns” (Brookfield Residential 2019), though this statement about concerns was subsequently removed Bucolic as it sounds, Calgary’s regulatory flood maps reveal that Riverstone was built almost entirely within the city’s Flood Fringe, designated by engineers and hydrologists as a high-risk flood area. There are some iconic case-studies of environmental injustices that affect marginalized communities, residents of urban hazardscapes are less commonly asked about how they view the ongoing production of risk To add this missing piece, this article applies a theoretical framework drawn from the political economy of place-making, urban development, and risk, to answer several questions: How do residents living in floodprone areas attribute responsibility for creation of risk and protection from flooding? These different approaches, as we shall see, signal a lack of consensus about responsibility and about best-practices for flood risk mitigation

Literature Review

Findings

Conclusion