Mitigating Yesterday's Disaster: Historicizing Flood Mitigation Planning and the Environmental Racial State in the Lower Missouri River Sub-Basin
Topics: Hazards, Risks, and Disasters
, Human-Environment Geography
, Environmental Justice
Keywords: Flood mitigation, Environmental Racial State, societal impacts of hazards
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 58
Authors:
Sarah Heck, Temple University
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Abstract
Over the past several decades, flooding events in the United States have become the most frequent and costliest natural disaster. City and regional leaders around the world are planning new infrastructure in response to the challenges of flooding, uneven urbanization, and racialized exclusion. Historically, projects to keep water out have never been universal or evenly applied. Yet, ‘learning to live’ with water, a key tagline in current sustainable development paradigms, masks how histories of racialized land development are entangled with contemporary flood mitigation infrastructure projects and are productive of regional planning power. In this paper, I build on scholarship addressing the relationship between racial capitalism, the state, and the environment through a case study analyzing a state-led flood mitigation planning project following the 2019 spring floods on the Lower Missouri River. Through qualitative analysis of archival documents and participant observation, I historicize regional flood mitigation governance and argue global processes and local histories of racialized land development produce regional imaginaries and infrastructural landscapes impacting community vulnerabilities to flooding hazards.
Mitigating Yesterday's Disaster: Historicizing Flood Mitigation Planning and the Environmental Racial State in the Lower Missouri River Sub-Basin
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
Description
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