Post-disaster City Research Articles

Who feels safe? Risk perception, land vulnerability and state intervention in a post disaster city

Risks related to land vulnerability are common to many human settlements. Recent decades show an increase in Seismic Hazard Assessment models. Some techniques can be applied to buildings, giving households a better perception of the risk they are exposed to. In this paper, the aim is to define the value given to past and future hazards in housing transactions, differentiating the sources of risk between endogenous (derived from human activities) and exogenous (not related to human activities). The hedonic price model is used for the housing market to study the post-disaster city of L'Aquila in the aftermath of the 2009 earthquake. L'Aquila is an interesting case, because it is the first reconstruction process that has been completely funded by the state and with data transparently shared of the recovery process in a country with a high percentage of owner-occupancy. Thanks to this open-data policy, it is possible to define for the same housing transaction its land vulnerability, the effective damage after the earthquake and the amount of money spent for the reconstruction, this is the first time these dimensions are analyzed together. Results indicate a clear and persistent positive impact on prices for those houses that have not been damaged by the earthquake. Land vulnerability factors also play a great role on housing prices. Neighborhood spatial effects and public spending have also a good impact on housing prices. The inhabitants of a post-disaster city like L'Aquila are caring about their own safety but, at the same time, they put their trust in the ongoing state-driven reconstruction process. As a final consideration, this paper illustrates how a culture of prevention can have positive effects on population's safety and on households' wealth.

Connectivity Restoration of Urban Road Networks With Multivehicle Systems: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

The connectivity of urban road networks plays an important role in ensuring the functions of the infrastructure and the transportation of emergency supplies of a postdisaster city. When a disaster happens, clearing vehicles that are able to open blocked roads are precious resources in connectivity restoration and their work should be planned systematically and promptly. In this article, we proposed a novel reinforcement learning approach to swiftly providing restoration plans for clearing vehicles according to damage situations. This is a cluster-first, route-second type of method that includes an event-triggering algorithm to deal with the time-space model of vehicles and a specially designed cognitive module to decide the vehicle behaviors, which is represented by three kinds of preference in the behavior probability: the guidance, the memory, and the rules. Our approach has been tested on damaged Istanbul and synthetic road networks, confirming its superior capacity to generate near-optimal solutions in an extraordinarily short time, which is more practical and efficient in dealing with the case of multivehicle systems operating on complex large-scale urban road networks.

Can pro-equity hybrid governance shape an egalitarian city? Lessons from post-Katrina New Orleans

ABSTRACT This paper examines how different housing actors (social resilience cells and their partners, institutional structures, neighbourhood communities) in post-Katrina New Orleans have activated their social capital into institutional capital. It uses a critical up-to-date synthesis of social capital enriched by governance theories to investigate how new governance hybridities can be shaped in order to guide the city’s housing redevelopment. Furthermore, the paper seeks to evaluate the potential these governance hybridities have in redeveloping the city toward an egalitarian post-disaster city. By this is meant a city in which all affected neighbourhoods are recognized for their unique housing and social needs as well as for their distinct sociodemographic and physical characteristics, and where different social resilience cells are responsive to the needs of specific communities. The paper examines the unique rebuilding footprint and governance formation potential of eight social resilience cells in New Orleans. The results show that governance-improving fermentations were mostly brought to life by pro-equity and pro-comaterializing social resilience cells and their alliances at the local level during the late recovery years. Nonetheless, the new forms of governance are dominated by the pro-profit political economy paradigm. As such, the potential of the improved governance hybridities in facilitating egalitarian socio-spatial effects has remained moderate.

City profile: Canaan, Haiti - A new post disaster city

From 2010 to 2015, Canaan was perhaps the urban settlement with the fastest exponential growth in the Western hemisphere. Technically, Canaan is not a city—at least not in the administrative sense of the term. Nor is it simply a slum on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Instead, it is a vast, new and almost entirely self-constructed post-disaster settlement. In this city profile, we reveal the causes of this unprecedented urban phenomenon, draw a portrait of its current problems and opportunities, and present a critical review of recent policy, planning and management responses. Canaan emerged in the wake of the 2010 earthquake that partially destroyed Port-au-Prince and paralyzed the Haitian government for several months. In a matter of only five years, over 250,000 people occupied a previously empty zone. Today, Canaan lacks public infrastructure, but it is a relatively functional city. This profile reveals the gaps that exist between different perceptions of Canaan. Exposing the case of this new city sheds light on the impacts that disasters can have on urbanization dynamics. This profile invites readers to reflect on both the positive and negative impacts that the state, the aid industry, and citizens can have on peri-urban development in the Global South.

Shaken apart: Community archaeology in a post-disaster city

ABSTRACTOn 22 February 2011, a devastating earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand. The damage wrought by the earthquakes has led to an extensive archaeological project in the city, which has generated a wealth of new archaeological data. Both authors have long associations with the city and this has left them carrying out the archaeology of their own community, an experience that comes with a range of challenges and opportunities. These challenges and opportunities relate to the scale of the work, community engagement and how archaeology can contribute to breaking down the myths associated with Christchurch’s identity and its past.

Transitional Ethics and Aesthetics: Reimagining the Postdisaster City in Christchurch, New Zealand

The 2010 and 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, resulted in significant loss of life and injury and in the devastation of much of the center and east of the city. They also shook the foundations, structures, and assumed relations that had previously made the city legible, and in their aftermath the city was marked not only by a mournful sense of living with the hurt but also by coconstructions of new senses of life and place, involving alternative imaginations and performances of place. In this article we focus on how the event of the Christchurch earthquakes has summoned forth previously repressed and little noticed ideas and practices of transitional urbanism. Starting with localized performances of improvised community empowerment, a group of emergent transitional organizations in the city has begun to model new kinds of ethical fidelity to the perceived nature and potential of the earthquake event, especially in terms of transitional experimentation, civic rights of in-commonness, and the performance of aesthetic connection. With the passage of time, transitional organizations have connected these local priorities into wider international networks of transitionalism, acting as imagineers of transnational transitional activity. We argue, therefore, that the irruption of alternative imaginations and performances generated by the earthquakes needs to be understood in terms of both local and transnational assemblages of transition. Not only has fidelity to the event of the Christchurch earthquakes afforded opportunities to reshape collective engagements at the local level but it has also begun to influence transitionist activity in broader global society. Key Words: Christchurch earthquakes, event, fidelity, transitional ethics and aesthetics.

Knitting Feminist Politics: Exploring a Yarn-Bombing Performance in a Postdisaster City

The aim of this article is to explore urban knitting as a worldwide social movement, rather than solely a kind of “inoffensive urban graffiti” made with knitted fabric. Building on the available literature and original research, the article argues that this movement weaves together elements from craftivism, domesticity, handicraft, art, and feminism. It then explores a specific urban knitting initiative, called “Mettiamoci una pezza” (“Let’s patch it”), carried out in L’Aquila, Italy, 3 years after the earthquake that devastated the city in 2009. To analyze the sociopolitical aspects of this initiative, a series of qualitative research studies was conducted over time, to which were added semistructured interviews with the initiative’s local organizers. The findings show that the initiative in L’Aquila clearly exhibits the five original features of the urban knitting movement that emerge from the literature as being characteristic of this movement.

Risk and Recovery: Understanding Flood Risk Perceptions in a Postdisaster City—The Case of New Orleans

ABSTRACTFlood hazards are a serious and growing threat to the health and welfare of residents in cities and rural areas around the world. This cross-sectional study uses a sample of 383 residents living in seven New Orleans, Louisiana, neighborhoods to examine the effect of experiential, sociodemographic, and socioeconomic factors on flood risk perceptions. Findings suggest that respondents judge the level of flood risk to be lower than other types of risk. Results from ordinal logistic regression analyses show that flood risk perception is influenced by flood experience, income, race, gender, homeownership status, and years residing in New Orleans. Our findings support extant scholarship showing that African Americans tend to have higher perceptions of risk than whites and that low-income people and women have higher risk perceptions than higher income residents and men. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for risk management planning in coastal cities like New Orleans that face omnipresent flood threats associated with climate-change-driven sea level rise and increased frequency and destructiveness of storms.

Hazard Experience, Geophysical Vulnerability, and Flood Risk Perceptions in a Postdisaster City, the Case of New Orleans.

This article investigates the determinants of flood risk perceptions in New Orleans, Louisiana (United States), a deltaic coastal city highly vulnerable to seasonal nuisance flooding and hurricane-induced deluges and storm surges. Few studies have investigated the influence of hazard experience, geophysical vulnerability (hazard proximity), and risk perceptions in cities undergoing postdisaster recovery and rebuilding. We use ordinal logistic regression techniques to analyze experiential, geophysical, and sociodemographic variables derived from a survey of 384 residents in seven neighborhoods. We find that residents living in neighborhoods that flooded during Hurricane Katrina exhibit higher levels of perceived risk than those residents living in neighborhoods that did not flood. In addition, findings suggest that flood risk perception is positively associated with female gender, lower income, and direct flood experiences. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for theoretical and empirical research on environmental risk, flood risk communication strategies, and flood hazards planning.

Does the post-disaster resilient city really exist?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of “resilience” by disentangling the contentious interactions of various parameters that define and guide resilience trajectories, such as the physical infrastructure, socio-spatial inequalities, path dependencies, power relationships, competing discourses and human agency. This socio-political reconstruction of “resilience” is needed for two reasons: the concept of resilience becomes more responsive to the complex realities on the ground, and the discussion moves toward the promotion of more dynamic recovery governance models that can promote socially just allocated redundancy in housing actions, which could be seen as a key to incubating resilience.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper that mobilizes theories of urban political ecology, social innovation and housing with the aim to examine the tensions between various discourses that steer housing production during post-disaster recovery processes, and put a spotlight on the heterogeneity in the transformative capacity of the various actors, institutions and visions of housing systems that preexist or emerge in the post-disaster city. This heterogeneity of actors (i.e. growth coalitions, neighborhood associations and housing cooperatives) consequently leads the discussion toward the investigation of “new” roles of the state in formulating relevant disaster governance models and housing (re)construction systems.FindingsThe initial stress produced by a natural event is often extended because of long-term unmet housing needs. The repercussion of this prolonged stress is a loss of social progress partly due to the reiterated oppression of alternative housing production propositions. In this paper, the authors conclude that an asset-based community development approach to recovery can provide an antidote to the vicious cycles of social stress by opening up diverse housing options. This means that the recovery destiny is not predetermined according to pre-set ideas but is molded by the various bottom-up dynamics that democratically sketch the final socially desirable reconstruction outcome(s).Originality/valueThe contribution of this paper is twofold. By using theoretical insights from urban political ecology, housing studies and social innovation, the paper first builds up onto the current reconstruction of the notion of disaster resilience. Second, by identifying a heterogeneity of “social resilience cells”, the paper leads the discussion toward the investigation of the “new” role of the state in formulating relevant recovery governance models. In this respect, the paper builds a narrative of social justice in terms of the redistribution of resources and the cultivation of empowerment across the various housing providers who struggle for their right to the reconstruction experiment.

Middle-class flight from post-Katrina New Orleans: A theoretical analysis of inequality and schooling

We present a model of urban resilience where the pattern of disaster recovery is defined by forcibly evacuating the population of a city and then allowing people to return voluntarily. The model predicts the post-disaster population composition of a city, changes in its income distribution and citizen welfare, and changes in the level of public goods. Plausible ex-ante assumptions about urban characteristics lead to a post-disaster city that is smaller, more skill-intensive, and with higher mean educational attainment. The evolution of income inequality is more complex, even though unskilled wages rise, middle-class flight may cause income distribution to worsen. The analysis of disasters’ long term impact on fiscal structure and on demographic, income, and human capital distribution, illustrates the interplay of major determinants of resilience after a natural disaster. A stylized New Orleans around the time of its 2005 Katrina disaster is incorporated for realism and used as an example throughout. Predicted changes are broadly consistent with observed effects of Katrina on New Orleans.

Scraps of Home

Global vulnerability to natural hazards has increased in recent years but, as they represent complex intersection of social, political and economic factors, their impacts do not affect people equally. Simultaneously, a paradigm of “build back better” has emerged as a global agenda to promote resilience and continuum of relief, recovery and longer-term development. This article offers insights into the complexities of rebuilding by focusing on personal narratives collected between 2012 and 2015 in the aftermath of the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and ensuing tsunami. It offers seven accounts of how lived and embodied experiences of home and belonging in the post-disaster city of Banda Aceh offer modes of contestation for the concept of an Aceh that “is built back better”. Following the lives of people through their everyday experiences offers insights into the relations of power and the potential structures of violence that are embedded in the aftermath: layered exiles and displacement; hidden narratives of violence and grief; struggles over gendered expectations of being a good and respectable woman and man; the hierarchical political economy of post-conflict and tsunami reconstruction; and multiple ways of arranging lives and remembrance, cherishing loved ones and forming caring and loving relationships outside the normative notions of nuclear family and home.

“LIKE YOU, I WANT TO FEEL EXCITEMENT AND HOPE ABOUT OUR CITY”: ‘CHRISTCHURCH THE CITY’ IN CAMPAIGN MATERIAL OF THE 2013 CHRISTCHURCH CITY COUNCIL ELECTION

The Christchurch City Council election of 2013 provides a compelling case study through which to consider the interaction between politics and city space. On the one hand, through the careful placement of campaign posters, politics encroached on the physical terrain of the city. On the other hand, candidates included in their campaign material multitudinous references to ‘Christchurch the city,’ demonstrating the extent to which the physical environment of the post-disaster city had become central to local politics.

Challenging mainstream media, documenting real life and sharing with the community: An analysis of the motivations for producing citizen journalism in a post-disaster city

The aim of this article is to explore the motivations that drove many ordinary people to produce citizen journalism after the earthquake that destroyed the Italian city of L’Aquila in 2009. Using in-depth interviews, we investigate the motivations and the obstacles underlying the publication of grassroots information related to the post-earthquake situation. Findings highlight that people were largely motivated to upload their content online: (1) to contrast the quake-related news provided by Italian mainstream media with their own perceptions; (2) to document their lives and the ‘real situation’ of the city; and (3) to share their points of view with other citizens trying to re-establish online the ties broken offline because of the catastrophe. Analysis shows that these non-professional journalists also had to face a series of obstacles, such as risks of fragmentation and lack of professionalism, funding and visibility.

Art in a Post-disaster City: The Meanings of Prospect New Orleans

Art in a Post-disaster City: The Meanings of Prospect New Orleans

Freedom and Cultural Consciousness: Black Working-Class Parades in Post-Katrina New Orleans

ABSTRACT:This analysis of public parading in New Orleans extends a cultural sociology framework to shed new light on the importance of public parades in the construction of meaning in the postdisaster city. Not dependent upon a functioning city structure for their existence, public parades reemerged in the months following Katrina and have remained self-generating resources creating the logic and momentum for rebuilding communities and meaning in local life. Among these are parades of Mardi Gras Indian Tribes and Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs in which historical narratives of fictive Indian tribes and fictive nouveau riche are annually reinvented. Performances—involving body adornment, processional display, improvisational music, and dance—express symbols of freedom, while the collective participation that is a central tenet to these rituals creates an enduring cultural consciousness of self and city. For participants and observers, these mass gatherings on public streets provide a purpose, a process, and a gauge of recovery of the city’s culture in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Political Gardening in a Post-disaster City: Lessons from New Orleans

The study examines the emergence of urban gardening activities in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research conducted throughout the city between 2009 and 2012, it examines the ways in which various gardening projects in New Orleans exhibit different levels and scopes of political engagement, with a particular focus on how they manifest (sometimes in contradictory ways) in the projects’ missions and practices. On the basis of these findings, it is argued that current conceptualisations of political gardening are too limiting and do not account for the nuances of how politics shape, challenge and materialise in urban gardening activities. By highlighting the ever-shifting social, economic, and political context of the post-disaster recovery, the study illustrates how urban gardening is inherently political, but cautions that the extent to which gardening can subvert social injustice in the city may be limited.

Urban resilience in post-disaster reconstruction: Towards a resilient development in Sichuan, China

This article discusses the post-disaster urban resilience design framework in the case of post-disaster urban reconstruction in Sichuan after the Great Sichuan Earthquake (also known as the Wenchuan Earthquake) in May 2008 in China. The focus is on three main aspects of post-disaster urban reconstruction: sociospatial coherence, temporal continuity, and multistakeholder integration and communication. Critical interpretation of the government-guided reconstruction reveals that reconstruction was limited to the generic production and implementation of top-down planning. From the perspective of urban resilience, and through an alternative design scenario developed in this research, this article highlights an urban resilience design framework based on post-disaster development in the Sichuan city of Dujiangyan. By identifying the deficiencies of the governmental reconstruction where in many aspects resilience has not been considered, and by proposing the alternative where resilience has been considered to develop a better living, this research seeks to integrate urban resilience as a key aspect in the Sichuan reconstruction and as essential for developing the post-disaster city towards a more coherent, sustainable, and integral urban future.