Places as Recovery Machines: Vulnerability and Neighborhood Change After Major Hurricanes

This study advances a conceptual framework for understanding the transformation of places into recovery machines after major hurricanes. This framework contends that in the years following such disasters, pro-growth coalitions take advantage of new sources of material and symbolic capital to promote further demographic growth. It also contends that the spatial nature of this growth varies significantly as a result of social inequalities among residential subpopulations, contributing to uneven transformation of local neighborhoods across affected regions. To test hypotheses derived from this framework, we combine innovative Geographic Information Systems data from "billion dollar" storms of the early 1990s with demographic data from local census tracts. Results support the recovery machine framework and imply that post-disaster resilience may contribute to the creation of larger, more segregated versions of affected regions that await exposure with the next major disaster.