Slow violence to disasters: Exploring racialized topographies and contextualizing social vulnerability to flood and other environmental risks

Abstract

In traditional disaster scholarship, social vulnerability is a framework that leverages individual variables to explore stratification in the instance of disaster. As this body of literature has grown, we have lost more context as to why these variables are used within various applications. However, slow violence is another framework that does not necessarily focus on disasters traditionally but provides the social and political context to understand why certain individuals may be of greater risk. In this article, we combine social vulnerability and slow violence in a framework to demonstrate how individuals and groups are not inherently vulnerable to hazards. We leverage documentation from public media and related literature to contextualize the history of slow violence in two US case studies, Bonton - Texas and North Brentwood - Maryland. Despite the spatial differences between the two African-American communities, they share many similarities in how planning policy, practice, and implementation, over time, perpetrate slow violence through urban form and create social vulnerabilities and ultimately, disasters. We hope future literature can utilize the combined framework included in this manuscript to investigate and explain how a community's vulnerable predisposition to disaster is created by social and political forces at the community-level.