The "Katrina Effect": On the Nature of Catastrophe

Description

On August 29th 2005, the headwaters of Hurricane Katrina's storm-surge arrived at New Orleans, the levees broke and the city was inundated. Perhaps no other disaster of the 21st century has so captured the global media's attention and featured in the 'imagination of disaster' like Katrina. The Katrina Effect charts the important ethical territory that underscores thinking about disaster and the built environment globally. Given the unfolding of recent events, disasters are acquiring original and complex meanings. This is partly because of the global expansion and technological interaction of urban societies in which the multiple and varied impacts of disasters are recognized. These meanings pose significant new problems for civil society: what becomes of public accountability, egalitarianism and other democratic ideals in the face of catastrophe? This collection of critical essays assesses the storm's global impact on overlapping urban, social and political imaginaries. Given the coincidence and 'perfect storm' of environmental, geo-political and economic challenges facing liberal democratic societies, communities will come under increasing strain to preserve and restore social fabric while affording all citizens equal opportunity in determining the forms that future cities and communities will take. Today, 21st century economic neo-liberalism, global warming or recent theories of 'urban vulnerability' and resilience provide key new contexts for understanding the meaning and legacy of Katrina.

William M. Taylor is Winthrop Professor of Architecture at the University of Western Australia, Australia. Michael P. Levine is Winthrop Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Australia, Australia. Oenone Rooksby is a Research Associate at the University of Western Australia and a Graduate Architect at Officer Woods Architects, Australia. Joely-Kym Sobott is a Research Associate at the University of Western Australia, and teaches in the field of Architectural History and Theory.

This well curated collection is as timely as it is sobering. It provides an urgently needed look into the fragile networks that hold societies together and that quickly unravel when a debilitated area is hit by calamity. By examining the political, technological, psychosocial, and material components of catastrophic natural events-or tragedy of the sort that climate change is bound to intensify-these essays force us to confront what otherwise staggers the mind. They demand that we be willing and able to think openly and honestly about the whole tangle of vulnerabilities that create the conditions for worst-case disaster scenarios. * Lawrence Torcello, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA * The 'Katrina effect' describes the process by which the 2005 hurricane that devastated New Orleans became a central point of reference for larger critiques of existing social, political, and economic relations and structures. Katrina, the editors suggest, became shorthand to describe the failure of institutions, leaders, and policies in a variety of contexts and for the reckoning and debates that followed those failures, both in the US and abroad. This excellent collection of 14 essays probes the 'Katrina effect' from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Contributions come from an international roster of historians, philosophers, sociologists, architects, urban planners, and journalists. The essays explore the impact of the disaster on New Orleans (the photo essay by local journalist James O'Byrne is especially noteworthy), but they also place the city and hurricane in larger contexts, including discussions of US urban policy, neoliberal economic policies, and the politics of memory. Several authors compare and contrast events in New Orleans with the situation in Port-au-Prince following the 2010 earthquake. The editors provide an excellent introduction. A valuable collection that will be of great interest to scholars in a range fields. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -- M. Mulcahy, Loyola University Maryland, USA * CHOICE *