Miami Beach forever? Urbanism in the back loop

Wakefield, Stephanie

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.10.016

Cited by 20 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…They are thus mostly inhabited by higher income non-Hispanic white groups (Chakraborty, Collins, Montgomery, & Grineski, 2014). Although these residents are more exposed to flooding, risks are offset by insurance and other mitigating measures (Chakraborty, Collins, Montgomery, & Grineski, 2014;Wakefield, 2019). Inland areas instead have a lower exposure yet a higher vulnerability, making them an exemplary expression of the class-race-vulnerability nexus (Collins & Grineski, 2017).…”

Section: A Social-environmental Extremes Scenario Of Extreme Flooding In Miami Floridamentioning

confidence: 99%

Scenarios of Human Responses to Unprecedented Social‐Environmental Extreme Events

2021

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In a rapidly changing world, what is today an unprecedented extreme may soon become the norm. As a result, extreme‐related disasters are expected to become more frequent and intense. This will have widespread socio‐economic consequences and affect the ability of different societal groups to recover from and adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions. Therefore, there is the need to decipher the relation between genesis of unprecedented events, accumulation and distribution of risk, and recovery trajectories across different societal groups. Here, we develop an analytical approach to unravel the complexity of future extremes and multiscalar societal responses—from households to national governments and from immediate impacts to longer term recovery. This requires creating new forms of knowledge that integrate analyses of the past—that is, structural causes and political processes of risk accumulation and differentiated recovery trajectories—with plausible scenarios of future environmental extremes grounded in the event‐specific literature. We specifically seek to combine the physical characteristics of the extremes with examinations of how culture, politics, power, and policy visions shape societal responses to unprecedented events, and interpret the events as social‐environmental extremes. This new approach, at the nexus between social and natural sciences, has the concrete advantage of providing an impact‐focused vision of future social‐environmental risks, beyond what is achievable within conventional disciplinary boundaries. In this paper, we focus on extreme flooding events and the societal responses they elicit. However, our approach is flexible and applicable to a wide range of extreme events. We see it as the first building block of a new field of research, allowing for novel and integrated theoretical explanations and forecasting of social‐environmental extremes.

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Section: A Social-environmental Extremes Scenario Of Extreme Flooding In Miami Floridamentioning

confidence: 99%

Scenarios of Human Responses to Unprecedented Social‐Environmental Extreme Events

2021

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“…They demonstrate (through advanced modeling capacity, active fundraising, and a steady pipeline of projects) the State’s appetite to shield a broad array of fixed assets from coastal vulnerabilities. The very existence of the CPRA and its ongoing expenditures serve to soothe nervous lenders, underwriters and other business interests, performing the value of the state’s protective intent (Nost, 2015; Wakefield, 2019a).…”

Section: Protection and Its Three Elements Of Circularitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Fresh research already shows ToP 2 at work in states and cities heavily dependent on tourism and property tax revenue linked to esthetically desirable, yet environmentally overburdened, urban areas. Major urban areas such as Boston, metro-Miami, New York, Venice, and Jakarta are all doubling down on expensive coastal infrastructure protections in recognition of risk, while also paradoxically encouraging additional coastal development to help maintain the tax base that pays for protection (Cohen, 2020; Samiolo, 2012; Taylor, 2020; Wakefield, 2019a; Colven 2017). Evoking the treadmill in all but name, one planning scholar writes in reference to Boston, “The trend of dense new developments along the coast is worrisome because it commits taxpayers to protecting these investments down the road—stressing the very budgets that town leaders and city planners hope to balance by building the developments in the first place” (Shi, 2020).…”

Section: Reframing Protectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The treadmill of protection: How public finance constrains climate adaptation

Gray

2021

The Anthropocene Review

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As the physical impacts of the Anthropocene begin to make themselves felt around the globe, maintaining current levels of economic prosperity, in many communities, will consume an increasing portion of public finances. This is because existing investments in property and capital will require new forms of protection if they are to continue generating stable streams of public revenue. Since Anthropocene impacts are unevenly distributed, some territories will be under more pressure than others to shift limited public spending to cope with growing levels of exposure. The sinking of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands provides a clear example of this trend of accelerating local vulnerability due to human-induced environmental change. With the bulk of state revenue tied to activities concentrated along Louisiana’s coasts, the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has launched an ambitious plan of government-backed expenditures that seek to defend the economic viability of these zones. Yet, many actions aimed at preventing immediate loss also work to secure incumbent extractive industries, such as offshore oil and gas drilling, which themselves contribute to the very vulnerabilities requiring state intervention in the first place. This paper, borrowing from the environmental sociology of Allan Schnaiberg, considers the social consequences of this dynamic, dubbed the “treadmill of protection.”

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“…In the City of Miami Beach, "anti-resilience" coalitions led by Kunst, introduced in the opening vignette, have formed around the belief that bond-and feefinanced resilience projects are meant to maintain financial market investments as climates change, not to protect vulnerable residents and ecosystems. As research has linked these investments to recent ecosystem degradation, these coalitions have delayed or thwarted significant portions of fee-and bond-funded resilience projects (Wakefield, 2019). These struggles are ongoing and work to counter increasingly dominant conceptions of resilience that rating agency action on resilience has helped stabilize.…”

Section: Spaces Of Negotiationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This tendency suggests that many elements of Moody's' actions will likely be borrowed or mimicked by the rest. I selected Greater Miami because the region is an exemplary and early "edge" case of how highly financialized cities are responding to changing, climate-linked market conditions through investments in urban resilience (Taylor, 2020;Wakefield, 2019). Thus, elements of what transpires in Greater Miami as it responds to changing rating practices may be seen in other, highly financialized cities as climates change, inviting comparative projects in this rapidly growing arena.…”

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confidence: 99%

Inscriptions of resilience: Bond ratings and the government of climate risk in Greater Miami, Florida

Cox

2021

Environ Plan A

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In recent years, credit rating agencies have begun to incorporate a municipality's resilience and vulnerability to climate change into their US municipal bond rating methods. Drawing on the case of Greater Miami resilience planning and Science and Technology Studies-inspired work on inscriptive devices, I investigate how this incorporation practically happens, and how it shapes the ways that Greater Miami governments attempt to govern climate risk through resilience investments. What “counts” as resilience there, I suggest, is increasingly an effect of the observational practices of rating agencies. However, the still-emergent status of resilience as an object of knowledge among rating agencies and Greater Miami governments means that resilience retains a degree of plasticity, allowing government officials and residents alike to mobilize the term for different purposes and toward different ends. In tracing the emergent relations between rating agency practice on climate risk and local government resilience investments, the paper makes two contributions to scholarship in economic and urban geography. First, it illuminates the ways that extra-local practices of expert valuation shape the local construction of environmental fixes. Second, it offers insights into how one of the key actors of the 2007–2008 financial crisis is beginning to lay the epistemic groundwork for future economic crises and inequalities in and between cities, this time as they relate to climate change impacts and a city's supposed resilience and vulnerability to them.

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Miami Beach forever? Urbanism in the back loop

Cited by 20 publications

References 36 publications

Scenarios of Human Responses to Unprecedented Social‐Environmental Extreme Events

Scenarios of Human Responses to Unprecedented Social‐Environmental Extreme Events

The treadmill of protection: How public finance constrains climate adaptation

Inscriptions of resilience: Bond ratings and the government of climate risk in Greater Miami, Florida

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