The Resilience Fix to Climate Disasters: Recursive and Contested Relations with Equity and Justice-Based Transformations in the Global South

Abstract

This article engages with the taken-for-granted separation between resilience as stability and resilience as transformation after disasters. It examines whether strategies adopted after climate disasters are transforming cities in ways that foster egalitarian urbanism or reinforce capitalist urbanization. To address this question, I develop the notion of a resilience fix, returning to Harvey’s influential thesis on spatial fix that captures how capitalism overcomes its crises of overaccumulation by deepening its spread through the production of new spaces and the built environment. I combine this thesis with an interrogation of urban metabolism and the governance of urban life and spaces to show the recursive relations between resilience fixes and transformative resilience strategies. Focusing on a ten-year postdisaster development in Metro Manila, this study shows how resilience fixes act within and through political economy systems, land use planning, technology adoption, and risk management regimes to decenter those who experience the double violence of capitalist urbanization and disaster capitalism while naturalizing utopian development, citizen surveillance, and a class-based retreat from the city. By offering false solutions and translocating disasters, these fixes inextricably reproduced social inequalities that would stimulate resistance politics and counterhegemonic strategies aimed at partial transformation.