University of California, Berkeley IAS/ DCRP

Fall 2013 Professor Ananya Roy

GPP 115/ CP 115 Lecture Supplement: Post-Disaster Development November 5 DISASTER CAPITALISM: In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein argues that disasters provide the opportunity for the consolidation of powerful interests of exploitation, predation, and profit. In other words, reconstruction and even humanitarian aid often becomes a profitable business. In her recent work, Vincanne Adams, expands this argument by drawing attention to what she calls the poverty factory (quite similar to our discussions of the poverty business). This includes: a) Post-disaster development as an opportunity to reap massive, unregulated profits in the provision of aid and assistance to those impacted by the disaster. She calls these crisis markets. b) That the inefficiencies of profit delay recovery and sustain suffering c) Governments remain involved in humanitarian relief and recovery assistance but subcontract such work to both nonprofit and profit-making organizations and corporations. We can think of this as the privatization of relief and postdisaster development. d) That an affect economy is part of this nexus of disaster recovery and profit: volunteers, seeking to do good, become the unpaid labor of the poverty factory. We can link Vincanne Adamss concept of the affect economy to E.C. Jamess (last weeks reading) concept of the compassion economy, i.e. how, amidst the political economy of trauma, testimonials of victimhood become the dominant format through which suffering is recognized. For an example of such processes, consider Adamss analysis of the Road Home program which was set up after Katrina to provide a pathway of recovery to those displaced by the hurricane. UNEVEN GEOGRAPHIES OF RISK & RECOVERY Neil Smith writes: At all phases, up to and including reconstruction, disasters dont simply flatten landscapes, washing them smooth. Rather they deepen and erode the

ruts of social difference they encounter. This happened in many ways in New Orleans after Katrina, including assistance for homeowners vs. displacement for renters and public housing residents. THE RIGHT OF RETURN Many of the New Orleans based social movements have used the language of right of return in order to frame the rights of the displaced. In doing so, they have relied on international frameworks of human rights. In particular, these groups have directly engaged with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing to present the case of New Orleans as an instance of forced evictions and housing vulnerability. Note that a fierce debate wages about the right of return with some scholars (e.g. Xavier de Souza Briggs) insisting on assisted mobility rather than the right of return. Of poor neighborhoods in New Orleans he writes: These were not freely chosen ethnic enclaves but high-crime, jobless racial ghettos created by bad policy and preserved by discrimination and neglect. Let us not recreate those places in hopes of restoring vital social support for the worst off. In contrast, the Right to the City Alliance writes: Proponents of the deconcentration theory argue that the problem with public housing is that poor people living near each other will create and sustain a culture of poverty that fuels social problems such as crime, drug use, and violence. In order to alleviate poverty, this theory posits, public housing should be dismantled and low-income people should be moved to better neighborhoods where they can access opportunities such as jobs, good housing, good schools, and other services This report counters the underlying premise of the deconcentration theory by providing evidence that the problems with public housing are due to lack of resources and services in low-income communities, rather than simply the concentration of low-income people themselves Fundamentally, the Right to the City Alliance believes that public housing and, indeed, all housing should be a right. The right of return is closely related to the concept of the right to the city, which derives from the work of French urbanist, Henri Lefebvre, and which we will discuss later this semester. For Lefebvre, the right to the city is an assertion of use-value over exchange-value (thus the right to housing vs. the right to property) but it is also a broad right imagined as the right to participate in the city and in urban life.