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Hendrik Vollmer, Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans By Kevin Fox Gotham and Miriam Greenberg Oxford University Press. 2014. 352 pp., $ 24.95, Social Forces, Volume 94, Issue 4, June 2016, Page e119, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sov037
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Extract
“Crisis cities” is both a comparative investigation of how two American cities—post-9/11 New York City and post-Katrina New Orleans—have coped with the impact of a major disaster and an attempt to establish these cities as paradigm cases of a more general phenomenon. “Crisis cities” in the latter sense are seen by the authors to be manifestations of a global pattern of “crisis-driven urbanization” (xi, 11–16). Drawing on a wide array of ethnographic data, interviews, media, and official documents, Gotham and Greenberg discuss how both post-disaster cities exemplify a pattern of urbanization driven by what is broadly characterized as a neoliberal approach to post-disaster redevelopment, and thus by the interests of corporations, investors, real estate agents, and tourists rather than by the immediate and long-term needs of the cities' inhabitants (221f.). In this way, post-disaster responses extend and reinforce preexisting trends toward market-oriented reforms in both cities and, with respect to “crisis-driven urbanization,” induce another cycle of crisis and crisis response in a series of transformations of urban space increasingly dominated by “urban neoliberalization” (13, 227). Whether crises in the longer series of “crisis-driven urbanization” are brought about by fiscal squeezes, terrorist attacks, natural or man-made disasters, a continuity of crisis response is sustained that is very much in line with Naomi Klein's understanding of the “shock doctrine” of “disaster capitalism” (10, 135). Not only do crisis responses unevenly favor the interests of financial capital, they also introduce, by neglecting the needs of less affluent residents, new risks and vulnerabilities into “crisis cities.” Gotham and Greenberg thus anticipate an “increasing accumulation of crises” (240) both locally and, in an age of “concatenated crises,” across the globe.
