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In the arena: contesting disaster creation in cities

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posted on 2024-01-22, 16:35 authored by Wesley Webb Cheek, Ksenia ChmutinaKsenia Chmutina, Jason von Meding

Space is a feature of all disasters, and it is through decisions on how space is developed, used, and reproduced that disasters manifest themselves. Critical urban theory sees urban space—cities—as an arena of contestation expressed through the relationship between people, power, and the built environment. Cities allow for an unpacking of this process of contestation through the interpretation of various temporal, spatial, social, and physical elements that together create complex issues and ‘wicked problems’. In these urban spaces in all their complexity, disasters reveal both the worst injustices and inequalities present in a society. By drawing on three well-known cases—Hurricane Katrina in 2010; the Haiti earthquake in 2010; and the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011—this paper not only explores the opportunities that critical urban theory presents for gaining a deeper understanding of disaster risk creation, but also it encourages disaster scholars to engage with it.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Disasters

Volume

48

Issue

1

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-ND). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2023-04-30

Publication date

2023-09-15

Copyright date

2023

ISSN

0361-3666

eISSN

1467-7717

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Ksenia Chmutina. Deposit date: 10 May 2023

Article number

e12588

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