Analysis of the disaster problematique from a political ecology perspective.

This doctoral research focuses on housing systems, especially on subsidized housing in the city of New Orleans post-Katrina. The aim is to give a societally embedded content to the notion of ‘social resilience’ based on a critical analysis of the diversity of pre-existent and emerging housing actors in the early and late recovery years in post-Katrina New Orleans. The study further aspires to propose recovery governance arrangements that are socially optimal both for the housing actors involved in the reconstruction process and the social groups whom they aim to serve.

‘Social resilience’ is analyzed and assessed through macro and micro lenses. The study first zooms out to examine how heterogeneous and temporal discursive and material practices of housing actors in their interactions with institutional structures inform and determine the directionality of recovery trajectories in a post-disaster urban context. Subsequently, the research focuses on the various social capital features of housing actors and how these are transformed into new housing governance structures/hybridities, thus forming an enabling framework for a multiplicity of housing initiatives across all disaster-affected neighborhoods.

Using Turner’s dual understanding of housing as a verb and as a noun, the study develops the concept of ‘social resilience cells’ (SRCs). In this way, it provides the notion of resilience with a socio-political content. The SRCs concept elevates ‘resilience’ from a single capacity of a system to resist shock and bounce back or bounce forward in a linear, monodirectional way, to a highly politically sensitive, continuously changing, socially transformative process, with various ‘bounce-forward’ imaginations and trajectories steered and materialized by a heterogeneity of SRCs.

The PhD research leverages critical theories of discourse, social innovation, political ecology, state and social capital to the benefit of a critical reading of how various SRCs (1)) employ different discursive and material practices to determine and reassess reconstruction trajectories; (2) interact with powerful institutional structures and state apparatuses to promote their agendas and accommodate their interests; and (3) activate their endogenous and exogenous social capital features to pursue new governance hybridities that can orchestrate recovery strategies on the basis of equity of treatment. Those practices and agential specificities of SRCs are not examined in an institutional and historical vacuum but as embedded in dynamic and contentious state arenas. The research confirms the key role of institutional structures – especially the state and its agencies – in promoting or refusing different resilience manifestations.

The empirical findings of this study have helped to further politicize the resilience discourse by busting discursive myths around ‘ideal’ recovery processes, revealing the multidirectionality of recovery trajectories and raising key issues about the normative role of the state within the heterogeneous institutional landscape of SRCs in housing systems.

Institutional structures – especially state authorities and elected officials – together with SRCs develop the macro institutional conditions under which social resilience is both promoted and hindered. Through the activation of their social capital in institutional arenas, the pro-equity and pro-comaterializing SRCs and their alliances have improved the governance structure. Nevertheless, their political modesty did not achieve to shake the political economy foundations that have enduringly privileged the pro-growth SRCs. When resilience is constrained by the narrow frames of housing policy implementation and its improvement, all governance hybridities will ultimately stumble upon the stubborn private-sector-oriented financialization paradigm in the U.S. housing systems. This paradigm has produced socially and spatially fragmented reconstruction. A governance hybridity based on equity, on the other hand, will create opportunities to valorize the multiple discursive and material assets of the SRCs. It will release space for various interconnected dynamics to develop all neighborhoods of the ‘post-disaster city’.

When resilience is seen as a universal political ideal and the state is open to and valorizes new value systems (based on reciprocity, cohesion and social solidarity) in which the new political economy is defined, SRCs pluralism can lead to a balanced and socially justified housing system.