From 9/11 to 8/29: Post-Disaster Recovery and Rebuilding in New York and New Orleans

This article examines the process of post-disaster recovery and rebuilding in New York City since 9/11 and in New Orleans since the Hurricane Katrina disaster (8/29). As destabilizing events, 9/11 and 8/29 forced a rethinking of the major categories, concepts and theories that long dominated disaster research. We analyze the form, trajectory and problems of reconstruction in the two cities with special emphasis on the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant program, the Liberty Zone and the Gulf Opportunity Zone, and tax-exempt private activity bonds to finance and promote reinvestment. Drawing on a variety of data sources, we show that New York and New Orleans have become important laboratories for entrepreneurial city and state governments seeking to use post-disaster rebuilding as an opportunity to push through far-reaching neoliberal policy reforms. The emphasis on using market-centered approaches for urban recovery and rebuilding in New York and New Orleans should be seen not as coherent or sustainable responses to urban disaster but rather as deeply contradictory restructuring strategies that are intensifying the problems they seek to remedy.