The Limits of Urban Resilience in Miami Beach, FL
Topics: Urban Geography
, Anthropocene
, Political Geography
Keywords: Anthropocene, urban resilience, planetary urbanization, infrastructure
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 59
Authors:
Stephanie Wakefield, Life University, Human Ecology Program
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
Abstract
Over the last decade, Anthropocene design, government, and political theory have largely focused on resilience and continuation of existing systems. However, this paper argues, as climate change effects have become more apparent in recent years, we are witness to the emergence of a new, 'closure'-focused problematization in which certain urban sites, technologies, and ways of life are deemed unviable and in need not of greater resilience but instead deconstruction. Engaging critically with work on destituent power and planetary urbanization, the paper explores the discourses, technologies, and imaginaries emerging as central to this problematization through two distinct, but temporally and spatially-related, urban adaptation experiments in South Florida. First, the Army Corps of Engineers’ attempt to protect urban drinking water supply from already-occurring saltwater intrusion, by dismantling modern water management infrastructure to free surface-water to flow according to prehistoric dimensions. Second, a proposal to preemptively retire Miami—considered already doomed by rising seas to-come— and repurpose it as fill for a self-sufficient island territory of artificial, infrastructurally linked high-rises. What ‘new urban spaces’ are produced via such real and imagined Anthropocenic endings, and what site-specific ‘cosmotechnics’ are seen as necessary to build them? How are seemingly distinct ‘dismantling’ projects linked temporally through climate change forecasts? Do such Anthropocene endings merely continue existing cycles of creative destruction, or might a qualitatively distinct paradigm of ‘destitution’ be emerging? What political possibilities does this open and foreclose?
The Limits of Urban Resilience in Miami Beach, FL
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
Description
This abstract is part of a session. Click here to view the session.
| Slides