Title of Session: Planning Resilience in a Neoliberal Age
AAG Annual Meeting, Chicago, April 21-25, 2015
Deadline for title and abstract (200 words max): October 25th, 2014.
Organisers: Paul O'Hare (Manchester Metropolitan University) & Angela Connelly (University of Manchester/ Lancaster University).
"It is through systematic engagement with the natural world and the manufactured physical environment that modern polities define and refine the meanings of citizenship and civic responsibility" (Jasanoff 2004, p. 14)
The neo-liberal urban condition is a powerful analytical model, particularly through the way that it seeks to subvert scale and space. As (welfare) state services and security systems become increasingly privitised, citizens are asked to take personal responsibility in a host of domains; and so they self-discipline themselves in line with neoliberal policies which manage at a distance (Rose 1999; Lemke 2001; Raco 2009).
At the same time, there has been an increasing recognition that the nation-state cannot prevent natural disasters, which has resulted in a paradigm shift from “protection” to learning to live with risk; meaning that the social contract is being rewritten (Adger et al 2012). Meanwhile, private sector actors are stepping in to provide crucial security and climate functions, such as agricultural landowners permitting their lands to flood for incentive (Tompkins & Eakin 2012) or flood risk assessment companies that can provide consultancy expertise for a fee. Thus, the role of government continues to recede ever more into the distance, and risk is instead displaced onto the private sector and citizens.
Political discourses around the seemingly mundane aspects of increasing resilience to extreme weather events, health issues and security reveal many tensions. It is hard to argue against the fostering social ties and taking heed of local as well as expert knowledge. Yet, such language can be used to mask neoliberal tendencies towards reducing public provision and offering neither support nor a safety net to underpin citizen resilience (O’Hare & White 2013). Disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, continue to expose the vulnerability of even the so-called richer nations, and revealed deep and underlying environmental injustices (Harvey 2009). There are unresolved tensions between the role of the expert vis-à-vis communities, even though experimental approaches to flood risk management suggest that new configurations of experts and citizens can help to reduce risk (Lane et al 2011).
The implications of the neo-liberalisation of man-made and natural disaster management is an issue that we believe has yet to be fully explored. This session is intended to open a dialogue between urban geographers, planners, and practitioners around the following themes and questions:
1) Who is responsible for increasing citizen resilience? What happens when there is a failure or breach?
2) How do intermediaries such as insurers operate, and how can they be held to account?
3) Are there discernible similarities and/or differences across political scales and places?
4) Are new vulnerabilities becoming evident in the move towards citizen responsibilisation?
5) What new material practices are forged around increased citizen responsibilisation?
Please contact Angela Connelly ([log in to unmask]) or Paul O’Hare ([log in to unmask]) for further information or to submit an abstract.
Information on AAG submission process: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers
References
N. W. Adger, T. Quinn, I. Lorenzoni, C. Murphy and J. Sweeney. 2012. “Changing Social Contracts in Climate-Change Adaptation.” Nature Climate Change 3( 4), pp. 330–33.
D. Harvey. 2009.Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
S. N. Lane, N. Odoni, C. Landström, S. J. Whatmore, N. Ward, and S. Bradley. 2011. “Doing Flood Risk Science Differently: An Experiment in Radical Scientific Method.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36, no. 1 (2011): 15–36. doi:10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00410.x.
T. Lemke. 2001. “The Birth of Bio-Politics” – Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality, Economy & Society, 30 (2), pp. 190-207.
P. O'Hare & I. White. 2013. 'Deconstructing Resilience: Lessons from Planning Practice' Special Edition of Planning Practice and Research, 28(3), pp. 275-279
M. Raco. 2009. From Expectations to Aspirations: State Modernisation, Urban Policy, and the Existential Politics of Welfare in the UK. Political Geography , 28, pp. 436 - 454
N. Rose. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
E. L. Tompkins and H. Eakin. 2012. ‘Managing Private and Public Adaptation to Climate Change.’ Global Environmental Change 22 (1),
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