Abstract
At first glance, the responses to the September 11, 2001, attack in New York and Hurricane Katrina's destruction in New Orleans in 2005 could not have been more different. In the first, victims were hailed as heroes and federal aid surpassed all previous levels. In the second, survivors were labeled criminals and the federal government notoriously stood by as more than 1,800 lives were lost in the storm and ensuing flood.
But as Kevin Fox Gotham and Miriam Greenberg point out in Crisis Cities, the responses to the two disasters bore historic similarities. In this comparative study, the authors argue that such crises can be “rupture and frame,” disrupting existing social, economic, and environmental systems, and an opportunity for elites to expand policies they identify as “crisis–driven urbanization.” Gotham and Greenberg demonstrate that both recovery programs were products of neoliberalism, characterized by neoliberal priorities such as selective privatization and abandonment of social welfare responsibilities, exacerbated inequality, and funding priorities that reward the wealthiest interests while dodging persistent problems.
The book traces the trajectories of the two cities from 1970s through early neoliberalism, disaster, and recovery. Both experienced urban crises in the decades before their respective disasters in the form of deindustrialization and municipal fiscal shortfalls. The framing of the two events and of their survivors—as an attack suffered by patriots in New York, and as a natural disaster that produced “refugees” in New Orleans—then set the stage for new recovery guidelines. Federal policies that had previously set income targets and public benefit requirements were eliminated, after which grants, loans, and other assistance flowed, most dramatically in New York, to some of the nation's wealthiest corporations. (Gotham and Greenberg point out that although federal funds after September 11 dwarfed previous disaster support, Wall Street's bonuses in 2006 alone, at $26 billion, were as large as the whole federal recovery program.) A subsequent chapter examines how both cities engaged in extensive “rebranding” campaigns, defining both cities as business–friendly places, distancing themselves from images of the disasters, and ignoring continued inequality.
The authors’ identification of these two recovery processes as neoliberal is like a thunderclap: so clear, the neoliberalism argument is instantly self–evident, yet in a decade, it has yet to be presented so forcefully. The book examines recovery programs in detail, an alphabet soup of revamped federal agencies that funneled money to local business–led public–private partnerships. Contrary to the celebratory rhetoric of resilience and recovery, the authors identify glaring gaps. Behind the ad campaign “Forever New Orleans” and despite rapid recent growth, the city's population remained 26 percent below its preflood size. Despite New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's boosterism, little help went to nearby Chinatown, where 40 factories closed and in the months after September 11, a third of workers were unemployed and another 40 percent underemployed. The inequality–aggravating effects of neoliberalism are on display in both cases, where small businesses suffered the worst effects of the disaster, while large corporations reaped a disproportionate share of recovery money. In Lower Manhattan, retail receipts dropped 42 percent while rents increased 171 percent, but only 11 percent of business recovery grants went to small businesses. Meanwhile, the Bank of New York received $40 million just to promise not to leave the city it was named for.
The neoliberal frame of Crisis Cities also subtly helps makes sense of disparate and sometimes contradictory findings in disaster studies: Neoliberalism's destructiveness explains how disasters can be sites of both the classic “community of solidarity” and the conflicts Kai Erikson has famously observed when dormant social fault lines erupt and powerful groups seek advantage at the expense of less powerful groups.
Certainly, not everything that happened can be attributed to neoliberalism. Some of the inequities in redevelopment result from partisan politics: The Democratic administration forgave federal loans to heavily Democratic New Orleans that their Republican predecessor had refused to forgive. Republicans stripped away means testing requirements, enabling them to direct funds toward businesses and elites, and away from Democratic–leaning, working–class urbanites. Other actions appear to be classic influence peddling more than something specific to post–1975 neoliberalism, as when the Governor of Louisiana gave a poorly monitored $912 million contract to a management company that had intensively lobbied the state.
The authors are careful to note that their vision of neoliberalism is not monolithic or mechanical but historically, culturally, and geographically contingent. But aspects of the New Orleans case in particular—the vilification of Katrina victims; the shuttering of schools, housing projects, and whole communities; and the bias toward funding corporate initiatives before those of everyday African American residents—remind the reader that neoliberalism is not just economic: It is a racial project. Crisis Cities uses the prevailing, economic definition of neoliberalism, but the book's most striking comparisons demonstrate it is more than that. Seven years after severe flooding, predominantly white Lakeview was bustling with a new school and fully leased commercial space while the city delayed restoring services to the Lower Ninth Ward, which saw a 78 percent drop in occupied housing units by 2010. The scenes in these two American cities only make sense if neoliberalism is a racialized and gendered process as much as an economic one.
Crisis Cities is an important demonstration of the way elites use crises as opportunities to implement neoliberalism, making it a valuable text for scholars, policy analysts, and upper level courses on urbanization, sustainability, redevelopment, and public policy. To identify how neoliberalism shaped both cities’ development strategies, the authors had to emphasize the similarities in responses to these two very different disasters. Gotham and Greenberg readily acknowledge differences between the two cities: After the 1970s, New York elites sought to fashion the city as a finance capital, while New Orleans exited the 1970s using federal money to refashion waterways and turn swampland into real estate for greater capital circulation. But it is necessarily left for future research to emphasize how the historical and political particularities of different cities may, as Janet Abu–Lughod (1999) observed in her study of globalization, produce unique manifestations of global economic processes.
After discussing how both cities rebranded themselves with the buzzwords of “diversity” and “sustainability,” the authors astutely note that redevelopment has more often reinforced “resilient inequalities [and] unjust sustainabilities.” The biggest problem with such unequal development, as Jared Diamond has argued, is that social inequality makes it very difficult to identify and address environmental and social crises before it is too late. It is all the more disturbing, then, that the authors demonstrate how both redevelopment processes made a mockery of public participation. (One symbolic monument to that mockery might be the new 1 World Trade Center, which, despite a public design process in which local residents, prospective tenants, and local officials made clear they rejected any attempt to rebuild the original World Trade Center Towers, rose to the exact same height—1,368 feet—and dimensions as the old 1 World Trade.) But in New Orleans and New York, as Gotham and Greenberg point out, the biggest “monument to 9/11 and Katrina—in functional if not literal terms—was urban redevelopment itself.” Crisis Cities is the much–needed guide to that troubling monument.