How maps make time

Abstract

Practices of remapping and rezoning land based on environmental risk are rapidly expanding worldwide. Designating certain urban areas as “at risk” in the context of climate change raises familiar conflicts over space and the fraught placement of borders and boundaries. It also gives rise to lesser-studied struggles over time. This article examines such temporal conflicts through a case of disputed risk mapping in New York City. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork over a four-year period after Hurricane Sandy, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was revising the city’s Flood Insurance Rate Maps, or FIRMs. FIRMs divide land into zones of risk to set insurance rates and building standards. They dictate how high exposed homes must be elevated and who can afford to live in them. This article adds to work on the social consequences of risk mapping, which in FEMA’s case is occurring in conjunction with changes to the National Flood Insurance Program that portend rate hikes for many households. Foregrounding the lived experience of being mapped into a flood zone, the article analyzes conflicts over how FIRMs represent risk, redistribute uncertainty, and reorient collective action in ways that threaten to hinder movement toward more flood-adapted futures. While maps are key to rendering the risks of climate change vivid and local, their use as technologies of governing adaptation produces its own contested effects, centered in part on competing temporalities like the flood-zone temporalities examined here.