Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans

Crisis Cities blends critical theoretical insight with a historically-grounded comparative study to examine the redevelopment efforts following the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina disasters. Based on years of research in the two cities, Gotham and Greenberg contend that New York and New Orleans
have emerged as paradigmatic crisis cities, representing a free-market approach to post-disaster redevelopment that is increasingly dominant for crisis-stricken cities around the world. This mode of urbanization emphasizes the privatization of disaster aid, devolution of recovery responsibility to
the local state, use of tax incentives and federal grants to spur market-centered redevelopment, and utopian branding campaigns to market the redeveloped city for business and tourism. Meanwhile, it eliminates low-income and public benefit standards that once underlay emergency provisions.
Focusing on the pre- and post-history of disaster, Gotham and Greenberg show how this approach exacerbates the uneven landscapes of risk and resiliency that helped produce crisis in the first place, while potentially reproducing the conditions for future crisis. At the same time, they highlight the
expanding coalitions that formed following 9/11 and Katrina to contest these inequities and envision a more just and sustainable urban future.


Author: Kevin Fox Gotham, Miriam Greenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 05/05/2014
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780199752218

About the Author

Kevin Fox Gotham is Professor of Sociology at Tulane University.

Miriam Greenberg is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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