Creating resilient cities: advocacy and planning for equity-based recovery

How effective have the different processes shaping social resilience been in New Orleans over the two decades following Hurricane Katrina (2005)? This paper addresses this question by critically re-examining social resilience within complex governance geometries. It demonstrates that social resilience is a profoundly heterogeneous, multi-governed and interdependent process involving diverse reconstruction actors, geographies and socio-material outcomes. In the first recovery decade, pro-growth housing actors largely determined the recovery trajectory, reinforcing uneven socio-spatial development. In the second decade, alternative pro-equity and pro-comaterialising housing alliances gradually redefined and practiced resilience by stressing equity, racial and climate justice, and systemic transformation in urban planning, redevelopment and governance. Despite their political presence, housing alliances achieved modest gains in production and policy, revealing institutional inadequacy to deliver post-disaster housing for all. Post-disaster egalitarian cities can be realised if recovery is ingrained in bottom-linked governance structures, a radical housing policy and substantial funding to all housing providers (both for-profit and non-profit) with equitable treatment. The New Orleans case study offers both a critical warning and a hopeful blueprint for reimagining and realising resilience as a catalyst for producing more egalitarian post-disaster cities in the US and beyond.

PRACTICE RELEVANCE

Resilient cities function as socio-spatial and political arenas where various social resilience cells (SRCs)—whether pro-growth, pro-equity or pro-comaterialising—and their allies continuously act to shape rebuilding trajectories and reconstruction geographies. Through a recombination of discursive and material practices and inter-institutional interactions, SRCs imagine and materialise urban environments that respond to their own development goals and the broader aspirations of citizens. This key finding is relevant for policymakers and housing practitioners. First, by using SRCs as a reference concept, it helps housing officers, practitioners and citizens understand key actors shaping post-disaster recovery, the resilience–housing nexus, alternative housing strategies and emerging governance arrangements. Second, as a diagnostic tool it helps anticipate possible recovery trajectories in urban areas hit by a disaster. Finally, as an advocacy tool, it helps to support similar alliances across the US and the world struggling for more affordable housing and egalitarian urban recovery/development processes.