Resilience, Recovery, and Reality: Hurricanes, Housing, and the Human Cost of Disaster

Abstract

Although resilience is an often-used term that can motivate and justify the deployment of significant resources, it has been criticized as meaningless and defined to death. Seeking to overcome this paradox—that the term is both conceptually powerful and derided as meaningless due to semantics—this dissertation seeks to reframe our approach to resilience by focusing on what it creates, rather than how it is described. Synthesizing natural hazards, environmental, and urban sociology with critical approaches to environmental justice, ideology, design, and the production of space, I argue that disaster-based environmental inequality sometimes originates in the pre-event preparedness phase, as programs focused on building resilience reflect and reproduce existing social priorities. These priorities may manifest both before and after the occurrence of disaster and may take shape by seemingly neutral efforts to protect people and structures. The goals of this project are to emphasize the importance of critical approaches to disaster planning well before a disaster focuses the public eye, as well as to challenge the assumption that uncritical disaster design and resilience planning represents a win-win. To illustrate this point, I introduce two case examples. The first is an analysis of the adoption of climate resilience criteria by the ratings agencies that analyze the creditworthiness of U.S. municipalities and their bond debt. I argue that the inclusion of environmental metrics in these ratings, while potentially beneficial, may prejudice the ability of lower-income counties and potentially lead to a financial cumulative disadvantage. The second is a qualitative analysis of the experiences of residents of the lower Florida Keys with Hurricane Irma in 2017. Here, I find that trauma arising from the storm was joined by a deeper sort of trauma resulting from bureaucratic frustrations that arose from the structures and regulations, like building codes, put in place to ensure hurricane safety. Over time, this trauma discouraged local residents from staying and encouraged real estate speculation, potentially contributing to the conversion of working class neighborhoods to tourism and vacation rentals. This evidences how well meaning yet uncritical climate and disaster resilience regimes can lead to environmental injustice.