Abstract
Between fires, drought, storm surges, erosion, and infrastructure collapse, my California hometown is being swallowed up. On a recent visit, I gaped at the changes, while residents seemed unbothered on their daily rounds of surfing and dogwalking. I always wonder what makes them so carefree about living precariously on the earth’s edge. There seems to be an assumption that someone “out there” is assuring the safety of this place: that experts will deliver new standards, new seawalls, and new Federal Emergency Management Agency funding and make it all work. I’m not so sure.
Albert Fu’s Risky Cities draws on similar concerns (and does nothing to allay my own). Fu writes that his book was originally inspired by reading environmental historian William Cronon’s account of California’s 1990s Laguna Canyon fire, which Fu had lived through himself (p. 11). This grounding in instability makes a perfect origin story for an environmental/urban sociologist. In his book, Fu argues that our society is not, as some may assume, doing the work necessary to prevent or mitigate risks of human-derived environmental disasters—even if the risks endanger capitalism’s viability. Instead, he writes, “risk is now deeply embedded within the built environment thanks to contemporary capitalism’s financialization of every sphere of human life” (p. 5). These risks are redistributed and transformed into vehicles for profit through mechanisms of securitization like financialization and insurance. As Fu puts it, “environmental bads such as disasters become valuable goods through disaster capitalism and urban development” (p. 4). Risks become one more commodity to bet on.
To illustrate his argument, Fu focuses on three phenomena, laid out in three chapters, whose incidence, risks, and outcomes are shaped by humans—wildfires, waste, and sinkholes. In so doing, Fu makes a good case for the need to look beyond individual phenomena or interactions, to the movement of risk and resources across a physical and financial landscape over time. While fire and garbage get more coverage in social science, Fu makes a convincing argument for better understanding both the material and symbolic aspects of sinkholes. As a material phenomenon, the ground under our feet is being literally undermined by resource extraction (draining aquifers, erosion, and so on). On a symbolic level, public projects to mitigate risk are often dismissed as fiscal “sinkholes” because if they work in preventing disaster, they can look like a “waste”: “The problem is that effective and resilient planning is invisible when it functions correctly” (p. 48). Returning to the literal, Fu describes how sinkholes have historically been used as waste receptacles—a way of pretending all the waste can just vanish under the Earth, consequence-free.
The concept of “risk” binds across domains: finance, the environment, infrastructure, and public health. Fu’s ingenuity is to consider those existential “physical” risks in tandem with fiscal risks, combining theory in urban studies and political economy with an environmentalist approach. If risk can be redistributed, it can also be conferred from one domain to another. And in the fiscal arena, with an endless appetite for more stuff to bet on, there can be incentive to increase existential risk for gambling purposes. Fu shows how the financial impacts of physical risk in one area can be displaced into a speculative transaction elsewhere. “Risk is handled as if it were a stock portfolio—a well-planned gamble to maximize profit. Put another way, the goal—not unlike a Vegas-style casino—is to minimize losses and always come out on top” (p. 33). Securitization has facilitated investment in the harmful consequences of risk as a growing industry.
Importantly, this behavior is not limited to Wall Street or Vegas but endemic in governance structures. For example, Fu writes that Florida’s public home insurance program has become a dominant insurance provider as more private companies refuse coverage to state homeowners. Even this “public” institution seeks higher profit than premiums can provide and invests on the side in “catastrophe bonds.” Fu also invokes historical examples of risk management as security theater, like when cities promoted their newly-professionalized fire companies to draw new residents. These and other safety regulations provide the illusion that technocratic solutions can “design away fire risk” (p. 85).
Even without the financialization of risk, a capitalist system will constantly seek to displace and externalize the costs and consequences of endless growth. Fu tracks the growth of international “waste management” companies facilitating and investing in the growth of waste production, making waste magically vanish (that sinkhole logic). As Fu notes, waste itself becomes a greenwashed product through promises of “waste-to-energy” conversion that often amounts to dirty trash incinerators (or, an example my student was recently struck by, the Environmental Protection Agency’s fast-tracking of a “green” “fossil fuel alternative” source of jet fuel, created by “recycled” plastic). The throughline is in the logic, as these examples can come from virtually any domain involving environment and resources. Which, to be clear, is really bad news.
As Fu shows, the problem is not just that we face extraordinary, possibly existential risks due to the rapacious abuse of resources. It is also that many are assuming we are all “on the same side” of an issue like planetary existential risk, thanks to successful corporate greenwashing efforts. The growing industries that quantify risk and incentivize its management show otherwise. Recent international calls, promoted by the likes of John Kerry at the United Nations, have held that green investments must be “de-risked.” These calls often amount to ransom demands made by the very perpetrators of climate disaster, refusing to consider any alternatives that will not lock in their constantly rising profits. A primary way to ensure profit is by hedging bets against project success—or by forcing the “borrower” to pay under all conditions, including project failure. We should be concerned about how much risk is now “locked in” to ensure return on investment and about the degree to which our current solutions to climate collapse are infected with this poisonous logic.
As an urban sociologist, Fu looks to urban solutions, calling “To create cities that are regenerative rather than simple growth machines” (p. 15). Toward “regenerative urbanism,” Fu recommends a “vulnerability” focus to elevate “social solutions” over “hard engineering solutions” (p. 122), more public financing for urban infrastructure (and I would argue, more public funding than financing), expanded public access to privatized data that could help cities adapt, and a more integrated approach to the urban/environmental interface. I look forward to more work connecting fatal flaws in the feel-good rhetoric of green capitalism with the myopia of contemporary technocratic regulation.