Lifting the spatial veil: using Soja’s Postmodern Geographies to theorize disasters

Disaster researchers have given us an ever deepening and widening understanding of disasters. However, we still lack complex theoretical arguments for why, in varied sites around the world, we continue to fail in similar, generalizable ways. In this paper, we propose that a ‘spatial veil’ obscures the larger, structural forces that define and delimit both disaster risk reduction (DRR) and post-disaster recovery. We apply a dialectical reading to the geography of disasters, drawing on the foundational work of Edward Soja. We argue that Soja’s work provides a powerful lens for understanding the ways in which space is produced and reproduced through social relations, and how these relations shape the distribution of risk and vulnerability. We apply this lens to the case of Hurricane Ida, which devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States in 2021. We argue that Ida was not simply a disaster, but rather a product of the region’s long history of uneven development and racialized disinvestment. We conclude by calling for a more critical and spatially-informed approach to DRR and post-disaster recovery.