 Welcome, everyone, to Democracy in Retreat, Master of Planning in the Longing World. I'm Jordan Seigart, the program manager of the Peel Center at Columbia University, one of the many co-sponsors of today's event. I'm just going to give you a few logistical details for today. Since we're on a bit of a tight schedule, we have a lot of people to hear from. So, we're going to hear from a few of the different co-sponsors, co-organizers at the beginning and then get started with our first panel. A few notes. The poster in the back has a program on it as well. So, feel free to pick one up and click. And there's also name tags if you don't have one, as well as a sign-in sheet and a slip of paper with a Wi-Fi password if you need one. Okay, let's see. So, coffee and food is available out there if you want to refill and restrooms as well. Water is around the corner. You can fill up your water bottle or cup. I'm going to be keeping time. So, pay attention because we have a lot to get through. I'm going to raise my hand at ten minutes to tell you to wrap up. We are going to have panel presentations and then a response and a moderated conversation and open it up for Q&A. So, I'm going to introduce Josh Lewis from the Bywater Institute, who is one of their locations and made very generously to let us use their space tonight. Thanks so much. Welcome, everyone, to the two-way river coastal center. Again, I'm Josh Lewis from the Research Director at the Bywater Institute. So, the Bywater Institute is an institute two-way university that works to develop interdisciplinary research initiatives around the urban and coastal environment. We have several different locations. We have an uptown office. This is sort of our downtown office on the research campus. We also have a facility on the West Bank. We have all the studio in the woods that some of you are familiar with. So, the Bywater Institute had a precursor with the Center for Biological and Environmental Research. So, we've been around for about 30 years in different iterations. But I have to say of all the events we've posted in terms of framing and content that people brought together, this is one of the most exciting topics in groups of people. Several mentors in the crowd today. And some rubber browsers as well. So, we're very pleased to have you all here. I want to point out one thing for those of you that live here in New Orleans. We have a speaker series that Bywater is running called Future City Future Coast. We had the author Elizabeth Rush here a couple of months ago. And on April 9th at 5.30 uptown we're visiting Stuart Pickett who's a urban ecologist. He's done a lot of work in Baltimore. So, that'll be uptown April 9th at 5.30. You can find that info online. One other sort of logistical thing with the sort of topics that we'll be discussing today sometimes we can find ourselves at odds with one another on certain things. So, if you need to take a break or cool off if you want a more quiet space you can find your way to the back of the building and there's a sort of dark room in there which, yeah having been a part of a few events around these sorts of topics that could be useful. And one other thing my colleague Amy Leeson since her regards she wasn't able to make it today but the sort of work around ecology, coastal planning kind of the politics of knowledge around these things are one of the big thrusts of what the bar weather is up to and if you're curious about some of the work we're doing you can look at the side of the main bridge in there and there's a bunch of papers and reports and stuff like that so feel free to take one with you. So, with that, again, welcome if I could need any help or answering questions please let me know I'm Reinhold Martin and I direct the Temple-Hoyne Mule Center for the study of American architecture at Columbia University one of what is it, eight seven co-sponsors co-organizers of this event and I'm just here very, very quickly to thank everyone, first to thank all of you for joining us here, for being here for participating, those of you who are speaking and those of you who are participating in other ways perhaps we're announcing for coming to this amazing spot and I also give a little shout out to Captain Power for what seems to be now busy going where Captain Power does on the river So, the co-organizers of, we should say maybe masterminds of this reflection on master climbing and democracy I also will, each of each of the co-organizers will be moderated panels so you get to hear from everybody as we go most of them but I just want to name the names I found Aigu from University of New Orleans Andy Horowitz from Tulane and Carol from Michael Grease also from Tulane so really huge thanks to all of you for all the work that you've done in collaboration with my colleagues and real masterminds on the field center side Jordan Steinbauer who you just met and Jacob Moore who is going to speak in a second and then finally just to name the names two entities from the University of New Orleans the Center for Hazard Assessment Responsive Technology and the climbing urban studies department and then five from Tulane the School of Architecture the Bywater the Center for the Gulf South and the Stone Center for Latin American oh sorry Latin American Studies and then of course the Mellon Program Community Engaged Scholarship so for all of the above and everyone else who's helped to make this possible a huge thank you from the field center from all the rest of us we see this as one of our tasks in reflecting on the infrastructure Jacob's going to say a bit more about that to help build an infrastructure an intellectual and institutional infrastructure for us to do the work that we do and so this is one little piece in the systems that we've tried to set up and Jacob's going to now say a bit more about how it might fit into the larger effort at the field center and in relation to the themes of the conference the system director of the field center a lot of thanks but really and it's been really enlightening over the last several months I also wanted to talk about behind the scenes co-organizers as well it's been a years long conversation now or year plus long conversation and we're really excited to keep it going so the field center is a small research center that's embedded within the architecture school at Columbia to sort of multi-year research projects that yield conferences, books events of all sorts and so I wanted to say really quickly something about the project that this we come to this collaboration through the lens of this project called Power Infrastructure America so Power is a project that challenges participants to think about how infrastructure relates to life across a series of intersecting concerns that are many but some of them are the persistent violence of racial capitalism the harm of being brought by climate change and its facilitators and the increasing threats to democracy at all levels of government where it can be threatened around the world so we're doing this through many forms but we just last week have launched a website that's trying to collect some of this work so through this website but also offline you can access some of the research trying to help support programming like this other forms of collaboration editorial components etc so through this website and elsewhere we're trying to connect dots through thinking about infrastructure and the ways that infrastructure forces things to intersect so I don't say intersecting lightlier and passing one need no further than the designated national emergency the boarder, the executive designation of the national emergency of the boarder the continued reliance on plastic water bottles in this land of Michigan or the ongoing power utility in Puerto Rico in Puerto Rico or Canberria to see the ways that power and infrastructure is organized or one might say government which we can talk about today today's multiple overlapping states of emergency but also the what we might understand the outside of those states of emergency which we can also talk about I also very quickly wanted to use an example of this intersection just recently I was listening to someone who I'm sure you've all heard speak in the last few months we're on a gun ride and people are calling her or she's calling herself I think they're architectically being a deal with good reason and she gave a quick answer that I thought was really concisely tied together also some of these intersections so just think a quick thought to imagine the coastal community like one that many of you are familiar with I'm sure or what many ones that you are familiar with experiencing intense climate emergency or increasing extreme weather events over the course of let's say the next 10 years it's very easy to imagine people of means, racial segregated likely people of means leaving that community as the extreme weather events increase and the municipal tax base decreases as they depart leaving behind people without the means to manage their retreat so to speak and what you end up having is what can masquerade as a municipal tax or a municipal finance emergency out of that that can be designated a financial emergency emergency manager is brought in we can talk about the details the point is the lines are not so long to connect what we often see as different types of emergency and different types of infrastructure are often doing that connecting and so I think a really important conversation today about how these different scenarios connect through conversations about climate and through conversations about the conversations of governments so at Google that's what we are trying to study and we're really really really excited to be here today to connect with some of the experts who have studied more than us from different perspectives many of which are rooted here on the Gulf and so I think I think I could speak a little bit more about the title of the conference but it's probably more or less evidence we're concerned with who the master is in master planning and what it has to say about systems of governments in and through these projects as they become more and more necessarily more and more frequent so I think I'll just let the panelists each describe more detail the moderators I should say or also as Ryan once said the co-organizers for today more detail perhaps what's in store during their panels and just in the effort I think it's moving I'll introduce Andy who can give us one of the first panel so Andy Horowitz is assistant professor of history at Tulane School of Liberal Arts who specializes in modern American political, cultural and environmental history Horowitz's current research explores disasters and the questions they give rise to about race, class, community trauma, inequality, the welfare state urban and suburban development extractive industry and environmental change he's writing a book under contract with Harvard University Press which I think you might speak about a little bit at the beginning of the panel so without further ado the challenges that we gather under the banner of climate change are usually not primarily about the climate usually they unsettle the moral basis of capitalism and its pursuit of growth the legitimacy of state action which often hurts when it tries to help and the processes and culture that give life its meaning as we try to make sense of wrenching change so consider this timeline local history on August 29th 2005 hurricane Katrina passed over metropolitan New Orleans and during the storm the federal levy system collapsed because it did not be constructed according to congressional authorize standards then New Orleans police officers shot and killed unarmed citizens the New Orleans city council voted to demolish the city's public housing developments the Louisiana state legislature voted to transform the city's public school system into a confederacy of charter schools Congress voted to fund the largest housing recovery program in US history that program appropriated money to homeowners but not to renters New Orleans police officers arrested musicians for leading jazz funerals without permits while violent crime plagued the city Louisiana state university shut down New Orleans public charity hospital while rates of mental illness surged the army corps of engineers encircled the city with a new levy system and the federal emergency management agency issued new flood insurance rate maps that released most homeowners from the requirement of the character flood insurance while the wetlands beyond the city walls continued to erupt and the city itself continued to sink a decade after the storm New Orleans population had fallen from 480,000 to around 290,000 and the vast majority of those missing nearly 100,000 people were African-American we've come to refer to that sequence of events as Katrina but for none of those effects was the hurricane approximate cause calling that history Katrina thus threatens to obscure the policy decisions social arrangements and the individual acts that were their true causes furthermore these acts were not a series of reactions to the weather but rather a series of contested responses to receive risks that in every case predated the flood every day we are faced with difficult choices with the great New Orleans writer Kalamu Nassalam in 2006 every day we ask ourselves what is this New Orleans we want to save what is this New Orleans we are trying to save and who are the we that are doing the saving phrase differently what is it riskier by extension what is it risk in many communities because this conference takes as a given that New Orleans is emblematic of many places the point of this first panel is to consider that question of risk how risk is or ought to be defined or managed who is at risk and what they are at risk of I'm privileged to have a distinguished panel to start my discussion of these essential questions so I'm going to introduce them briefly Craig Colby is professor of geography at LSU he's the author of several books that remain always within reach on my desk including unnatural metropolis resting New Orleans from nature, perilous place powerful storms, hurricane protection coastal Louisiana and southern waters the limits to abundance he's dedicated most of the last 15 years to research on community resilience and adaptation and continues to serve as a sartorial inspiration Tracy Birch is a coastal planner who works on community resilience and ecosystem management her research focuses on environmental vulnerability and innovative methods for community risk production her work in urban planning and environmental management has been supported by the Gulf Research Program with the national category of sciences the Water Institute of the Gulf and the Department of Homeland Security Zachary Lam is a Princeton Mellon fellow in urbanism and the environment his research focuses on the role of planning and design in shaping uneven vulnerability his next card book project making and unmaking the dry city examines flood mitigation in Deltas in Louisiana and Bangladesh Monique Burdan is the director of the Land Memory Bank in Sea Exchange and is a storyteller whose films and essays and other artworks document cultural and environmental changes and continuities coastal Louisiana Monique is a citizen of the United Home and Nation and is part of another Gulf as possible as core leadership circle working to envision and adjust economies and vibrant communities and sustainable ecologies and finally our respondent Liz Kossbach is assistant professor in the Department of Urban Planning and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability UCLA her research explores the social dimensions of climate change, questions of environmental and climate justice and how cities are adapting to extreme weather and sea level rise and she's currently writing an ethnographic account of community organized relocation after Hurricane Sandy titled retreats moving to higher ground climate change to the city with that we have not discussed who's going to go first but I think we should go any order than perhaps you were expecting so Greg can you Pleasure to be here, I'd love to do all on this formal city application and particularly when I am invited to come to an event where I don't have to do any organization I can four in, drop in and then I can retreat back to that conclusion so I thank the organizers for having me in today I want to answer, I want to discuss or address three questions although as I went through my notes last night I realized I don't answer any of them but I'll try to erase some additional questions or erase the criticisms about some of these issues, one that we really know who is vulnerable in the coast and then second how do we include marginalized in the planning process and then what is the role of migration and mobility in the survival of Louisiana's coastal cultures we've seen innumerable maps they're available over the the internet that show vulnerable populations but have we really identified vulnerability and here I mean the sensitivity to these big destructive events not the biophysical or social has, not exposure to biophysical or social hazards the standard approaches tend to use economic and demographic statistics that were not collected with the intent to gauge vulnerability so at best the proxy measures and many of the researchers who use the same data to use data to map vulnerability then turn it around and use the same data to map resilience which assumes the two traits opposite ends of the same continuum but some of the most vulnerable populations show them using the standard measures have proven to be sexually persistent in place because of their adaptive capacities and in fact are amazingly amazingly resilient through community networks and mobility Coastal Louisiana provides stunning evidence of this furthermore one of my creating students just recently defended her dissertation and made a compelling case that the qualitative methods which are not part of the standard tool kit to measure vulnerability can't expose vulnerable groups who are completely eclipsed using the standard methods this is not to say that they are safe or that they're economically, socially or culturally out of peril but her argument is that existing methods don't adequately map vulnerability the proxy measure don't always capture some groups along several other capable graduate students over the last several years we've examined community resilience after the BP oil desert of 2010 in doing this we did not allow the standard numerical approaches rather we traced the historical actions taken in communities to rebound after debilitating disasters looking for the actual practices the things people did had been stored in social memory between extreme events and then rolled out before the Coast Guard or FEMA arrived in the wake of hurricanes or oil spills these practices provide a much better indication of local resilient capacity but they don't figure into the state's planning process which relies more on the customary vulnerability measures by documenting actual practices we hope to avoid the tendency to turn resilience into a public policy approach that passes responsibility back down to the community level and absolves government of its role in providing an ultimate safety net we also want to steer clear of adopting a common definition that distorts the term of resilience to mean defiance that is we will not give in we are bigger and better than the storm proxy measures can be useful at the 10,000 foot level comparing social conditions in different locations but the prevalent notion in hazard research that extreme events are local and one size fits all planning and mitigation are not viable approaches this suggests to me that vulnerability and resilience need to be identified and understood at the local level now we include marginalized people in the planning process there are two basic issues here the first is rooted in the state's administrative structure CPRA or Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority this nation's agency with primary responsibility to plan and oversee coastal protection and restoration efforts it has no fundamental core responsibility to deal with people on the coast although they are certainly not absent from the plans nonetheless people society, culture are secondary both in terms of assessing risk planning projects and developing budgets to pay for those projects CPRA does not have a core responsibility to transplant communities nor does it budget to do so the state has another agency the Office of Community Development with primary responsibilities for addressing human needs and they are attempting to align their programs with the master plan but until the two agencies missions are fully aligned and their programs are integrated they will remain discontinuities in terms of goals and implementation of the state program long before CPRA there was a group called the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana which launched efforts in the late 1980s to address coastal land loss and encourage planning for restoration this is from their 1989 report this initial report was a result of a collaborative effort scientists and grassroots participants working together however it says the creation of CPRA much of the master planning process has tended to be more top down granted there is an extensive range of stakeholder engagement and CPRA has deliberately sought to expand this aspect of their success in planning but the engagement is typically limited to comments on drafts or plans prepared by technical experts there are numerous stakeholder committees that have a voice but industrial, urban and navigation advocates have received extra weight through the sheer numbers of their presence on stakeholder committees and their financial ability to deploy professional advocates to speak on their behalf despite frequent assertions of matters, the master planning process contains no comparable effort to map culture to model threats to culture or to formulate plans that explicitly seek to preserve or restore culture random one can argue that those at risk are not just those exposed but those who are neglected in the planning process the vulnerable are those with an adequate voice in the planning in a related issue early discussions of the land loss in the early 1990s defined risk as a process created by climate change due to the burning of fossil fuels with resulting sea level rise sediment diversion caused by human intervention to reduce flooding and canal dredging by oil and gas the Louisiana delegation the congress people from Louisiana used the term climate change and fossil fuel induced global warming in their testimony in 1989-1990 over time however the policy makers vocabulary and reports of plans naturalized processes contributing to land loss and sea level rise those terms still remain in use the changing terminology diminished the role of humans consequently discussions now tend to avoid seeking solutions to the underlying causes finally stakeholder engagement often occurs late in the process ignoring the long standing guidance of social impact assessment experts engagement follows the initial planning which does not typically permit participation in the initial formulation of the plans this sequence results in what some call a democratic deficit CPR is fundamentally devoid of staff and programs to address the cultural component of coastal land loss get advocates for a more humanities oriented approach and methods that allow for full participation argue for decisions rooted in deep cultural and social values and beliefs but currently there's no place for such consideration in the master plan at least that I'm aware coastal residents the third question is what is the role of migration and mobility coastal residents have been in motion for millennia prehistoric people followed the coast seward as it fell to build outward into the Gulf indigenous people moved towards the ends of the volumes in the 1700s to escape deadly encounters with Europeans people of African ancestry escaped to slavery by seeking refuge deep in the coastal wetlands Acadians exiled from their Canadian homes sought refuge in the wetlands and then incited new routes along the Mississippi although they eventually moved into the wetlands as plantation owners nudged them aside during the the sugar room of the 19th century Spain placed canary island soldiers on the water and barges of empire and maybe remained after the colonial period to trap and harvest the resources of Saint Bernard and Platinum's parishes Filipino soldiers lived and worked on still communities and veritary obey and Vietnamese arrived after their horrific diaspora in the 1970s and now work the coast each of these marginalized communities were able to sustain themselves in the coastal marshes and inland swamps peripheral to the mainstream economy and political structure and cultural resilience in a perilous place but the master plan oftentimes excludes such communities and they're typically the most socially vulnerable with little voice in the planning process oops through both economic and geographic mobility nonetheless they have persistent in place adapting their subsistence activities and livelihoods to previously unknown or at least unfamiliar natural resources they were treated to places of sanctuary and in the last century some retreated inland as storms destroyed communities like Sunear Caminata in 1893 and Manila Village in 1965 our respondent has written a really compelling piece on the use of the term retreat a term that stirs up much animosity here in coastal Louisiana and in fact and unfortunately I would add it has come to mean failure not adaptation if we're to practice a true respiratory plan we need to take the sentiments of the coastal residents and their attitude towards this term into account and for this reason I've taken on a mission to reacquaint coastal residents with their successful migrations in the past moving seaward and prehistory to stay with their reach of coastal resources and more recently moving landward to taking sensible steps to ensure cultural survival this is a map showing the general trend of post office locations post office of a tidal population decreases post offices are closed this shows the general trend since the 19th century post office movement in Louisiana and only one has been towards the coast after Katrina I use the term transplanting communities to insert the notion that with care and cultivation communities could arrive and arise in different locations and thrive again as they have done repeatedly in coastal Louisiana movement towards safety has been a successful cultural trade among Louisiana's coastal residents I hope we can rediscover this part of our cultural legacy and with an increase in an equivalent effort to restore and protect coastal cultures that includes movement towards safety that we might just make some real headlines thank you I am not however an architect I'm an urban planner in particular a coastal planner who focuses on community development and resilience within the coastal zone coastal I'm also the interim managing director of the coastal sustainability studio which is a small multidisciplinary research institute at LSU that engages architects, landscape architects, civil engineers but also geographers psychologists sociologists and a range of disciplines to work on issues related to coastal resilience but as much if not more recently recognizing the links between coastal communities and inland communities and how these shared fates are not necessarily separate but are in fact very much intertwined so in preparing for this talk I thought through kind of what is the title of the session which is what is at risk, who is at risk but how should it be defined and managed and really focused my discussion on that framework just to say first that today NOAA and many other federal agencies recognize that 52% of the US population lives within the coastal zone and depending on how you define the coastal zone those are very different numbers there are really kind of two separate definitions there are those coastal shoreline communities or coastal shoreline counties which is to say those counties that actually touch the coast that holds about 20% of the population the 52% number really comes in when we start to talk about coastal watersheds which are all of those areas that drain into coastal waters and one thing I need to note is that NOAA defines coastal shoreline counties as populations or the people who live within them are the populations most directly affected by the coast they define coastal watersheds as those populations most directly affecting the coast I would start by saying that this is probably not a very good framework to think of within the lab or since 2010 we've had ten one in a thousand year rain events almost all of them started offshore and moved inland or they were near coastal inland communities that were flooded and if you start to think of this Houston after Harvey Bat Rouge in 2016 any number of other communities these are coastal events that move inshore and then devastate inland communities interesting and we think of them as being very very separate places interesting to note that the Census Bureau predicts that these areas coastal watershed counties will increase in population by 9% which means more than 60% of the US population live in these places within the next or by 2020 Census so I would start by arguing first that who or what is at risk is a the majority of the population but also those kind of coupled coastal inland systems that we really need to be thinking about this framework for how we reduce risk and vulnerability and it gets down to kind of the finest even modeling if we think about environmental modeling we think about flood modeling coastal modeling is completely separate from riverine modeling they do not today really join in any way so if you have a coastal storm surge it is very hard to predict what your inland flooding is going to look like so even at that level we're not talking through the planning and community development framework we are not so as I said I am a New Orleans resident or I did not say that but I am a New Orleans resident I have lived here for 20 years it is very easy for me to imagine the city of New Orleans as being completely separate from the rest of the state of Louisiana it is only the fact that I teach in Baton Rouge and work further up river that I kind of pay attention to some of these facts and quite a bit of the work we have been doing through the CSS lately focuses on these connections this idea that A coastal processes are in fact impacting what is happening inland but also that those coastal processes are moving further inland so these impacts are happening further and further or closer and closer to our inland communities that the river systems the water systems that are upstream also have a significant impact on coastal watersheds this was recognized the work we have been doing or some of the work we have been doing recently focuses in particular on East Baton Rouge Livingston Ascension and Tangipahoa perishes which are inland are considered inland perishes but have recently been impacted by coastal processes and just to kind of drive this home this is a project this is the NOAA sea level rise viewer this is with 3 feet of sea level rise which I think for Louisiana is a conservative estimate this is not with storm surge this is just what the coastline looked like with sea level rise where suddenly we have a shoreline that is lagging at the edges of the fastest growing communities in the state of Louisiana if you think about places like Denham Springs and Gonzalez this is a coastline that starts to encroach very close to these places and these are places that have been developing without any thought to coastal issues sea level rise, climate change for the most part the standard is flat on grade and it's very much in doing this work I realize very much it's a process of economics it's cheaper to build that way and we don't think of these as places like climate change so we don't worry about it so just to give a few details about the 2016 storm that nobody remembers this is Baton Rouge in August 2016 it's important to note that Baton Rouge had been experiencing a series of events that can and are through research related to climate change which is before August 2016 the summer had been very dry what effectively in a place like Louisiana could be considered a drought we then had 5 times the August and average rain in 2 days 3 days really just to say usually in the month of August we would have 6 inches of rain there was 32 inches of rain in 3 days and then it didn't rain again for 6 weeks so the system is thrown out of balance because you have kind of dry drought conditions followed by heavy rain events which are becoming more frequent and are expected to continue to become more frequent so what does this mean in the city of Baton Rouge more than 11,000 people were in shelters 30,000 people were rescued from their homes and cars it's important to note that 30,000 many of those people were rescued from the interstate highway system which was flooded and also important to note that it was very much about in the coastal zone and almost not at all in inland communities and so people got in their cars trying to escape water and had no idea where to go and I think that officials really had no idea where to tell them to go because they didn't know what would flood and why and often times it was the roads that caused the flood also of note is that 90,000 homes that were flooded only 11% had flood insurance because it has very much been believed that flooding was not an issue that was facing a place like Baton Rouge or its suburbs so what we have done is look into what this means how you can start thinking through shifting these paradigms to try and reduce risk within these places so foremost suburban expansion and I'm going to go back to what Andy said which is he said that New Orleans is emblematic of the United States I would argue that Baton Rouge is emblematic of most of the United States that not right on the shoreline but these further inland communities that don't really see that they have risk suburban expansion highway building all of these kinds of things are fairly common across the United States in communities that are experiencing more flooding one thing we did was go in and look at the what does that mean to have this typical American style of development in Baton Rouge it means you moved further and further away from the core of the city which was to move into lower and lower areas the high ground of course is by the river and so the old city is the highest area and as you can see you're moving into the flood plains of multiple river systems into the Angi and Komi river systems also as you moved further out those houses were also less likely to be elevated because new buildings does means that it's kind of slab upgrade also the houses are getting bigger and the lots are getting smaller so you have more impervious surface over time also to be clear a lack of design vision so the picture on the left is a map from the Harlan Bartholomew master plan for the city of Baton Rouge which said there is a zone in the middle of the city that should be left green space to allow for floodways and flooding of course in 1948 they knew that adequate drainage was a significant problem in Baton Rouge this is the same area there and to the right you can see what that looks like today there is zero natural landscape left and it is a system that is bound to fail and fails regularly the other thing of course is that we never have enough funding or resources for the part of the process whereby you can actually reduce risk which is the long term planning and work on the ground and so as I start to run out of time thinking through kind of what does this mean even to go back to some of these I don't think it's as clear cut as to say it's a cultural or economic or environmental problem I think all of these show that it is all of those problems there is an economic shift that needs to occur that it is an environmental shift of course but it is also an architectural one there is a need and through work that I've done with Shirley Lasker who's here in the In-Mill room there is a need to shift how we build even at the site level to recognize the vulnerabilities within the environment and that those vulnerabilities go further inland and further out of the historic core of the city than we thought before to incorporate those into our development habits to get just quickly to the question of management I think first and foremost it is at the watershed scale we have to think about how water flows through an entire system which is not easy to do in Baton Rouge those outlining areas are the fastest growing areas places like Zachary, Denham Springs are on the edge we really need to figure out today as they're booming in development how to hold on to water as long as possible so it doesn't end up downstream there needs to be a coupling of these coastal risk-reverting systems in both modeling and community development that we need to recognize variation across regions that's social variation there are long held practices for resilience that are rarely tapped into as Craig mentioned there are places within a system where you need to again hang on to the water there's other places where you need to get it out as fast as possible and that becomes a much more nuanced approach to how we deal with resources than what we use today we also need to think about multi-use infrastructure how can these things that we build improve quality of life at the same time that they are reducing say flood risk and finally there absolutely needs to be a community engaged design practice it is not okay to ask people their opinions after the decisions have been made about projects we need to engage communities from the very beginning as messy and hard as that is to do and then take those recommendations and incorporate them because if nothing else there are never enough resources to do everything we need to do and we have to be able to talk to a community about what the definition of their community is and what their priorities are moving forward and with that we need to be able to handle with these folks and to get to hear what everyone else has to say today so the work I'm going to describe today is part of a larger project as Amy was describing is looking at the relationship or the multi-case study of DACA and the Bengal Delta and New Orleans here in Mississippi Delta I'm not going to really talk about DACA today but what I want to talk about is the component of the project that focuses on the role the sort of growing role of design and spatial planning in these questions how do communities adapt to climate change and flood risk so a lot of this is going to be familiar to many of you in the room and so please correct me when I go badly astray but okay so the water management has been at the core of urbanization for as long as there haven't been urban settlements right but we are seeing the sort of the confluence of climate change and flood risk and increased urbanization and coastal regions that's driving more and more cities to invest in either changing land use patterns or changing infrastructural configurations to protect existing settlements and to allow for the expansion of urban settlements right and so increasingly in recent years designers and spatial planners have been a major part of that process which is a different scenario than what we saw in this previous generation of flood risk management so the question I'm going to talk about today is how does design enable or cycle public deliberation on the cost and benefits of climate adaptation and so New Orleans is obviously a great place to think about these questions because this is a city that has since its very beginning for why I don't want this massive investments structure and structural barriers that people are out and then later in kind of a pump drainage to dry the city out since the beginning of the city and so this quote in the image at the top here comes from another Ronald Bartholomew plant from Exit 28 when they were planning to do this radical expansion of the city to the northern edge where Lake Pontchamp meets the city and they made this explicit decision at that point which I think is kind of diplomatic for the larger development process where they basically said we don't want any surface water in this territory at all no legumes, no lakes because to do so would accentuate the lowland idea which in New Orleans seems inappropriate which is basically to say we don't want to remind people that they live in a swamp and so that was the sort of like the driving ethos for generations of development in New Orleans and so that developed what I come to call this dry city approach and then in recent years we've really come to understand that this dry city approach has some radical, radical problems to it right so it's both and I sort of put those problems in two buckets on one hand that the sort of urbanization patterns that are generated by the dry city approach are unwise that is they sort of generate all manner of socio-ecological problems that were not sort of anticipated at the front end and that they're deeply unjust at the cost and benefits of those projects tend to flow very unevenly and get a sort of disadvantage to the most already disadvantaged members of society and so in recent years there's been this sort of conversation about a new paradigm of urban flood management or water management that's often described in these kind of binary terms right we're shifting from great to green from hard and soft from vertical to horizontal from a sort of modernizing approach to a restorative approach from a sort of adversarial approach to a more harmonious approach right and again design has been a major part of that conversation and the sort of two components that I saw both in DACA and New Orleans and many other similarly situated cities is on one hand to sort of realign the relationship between these levied cities and their delta landscapes and then on the other hand to kind of soften the landscape inside the levies to accommodate and pertain and infiltrate stormwater more effectively so these are just a couple of projects recent projects here in South Louisiana that have taken these approaches right and in both cases so we have the changing course competition above which was a Rockefeller Foundation and other funded project reimagined the lower Mississippi Delta and then the urban water plan below so in both cases design was a major component designers were major components of these conversations and so I talked to a bunch of folks who were involved in these processes as part of this research project and sort of came to on one hand what are the contributions that people see as where designers fit in these processes and where do they allow sort of new ways of thinking about the relationship between water and urbanization and those can broadly be sort of bucketed into process contributions product contributions and communication contributions right so people talked about this sort of sloppy thinking of design as being conducive to generating new synthesis that would otherwise not be possible in terms of product people talked about the kind of multiple, generating multiple benefits across different domains that in otherwise siloed processes again would not be possible and then in the communication realm which is one of the places that people again and again sort of highlighted the role of design one of the things people often described to me was that designers are particularly good at generating narratives and metaphors that are productive for sort of communicating these complex projects either to decision makers or to the public at large so but unfortunately there are also some sort of negative signs that emerge as well right so my research suggested that in many cases these sort of new rhetorical and imaginary processes enabled by design are often actually promoting what are sort of re-branded mega projects and this is one of the projects the proposals from the changing course competition that I think in my mind is emblematic of what is a kind of problematic re-embracing of a mega project approach right so and these are folks who are engaged in the project who described this as we ended up in a big engineering of that for luminary of that and this is sort of this metaphor of using taps to turn on and off sediment and water flow in the lower delta right which is an amazing embrace of the idea that we need more control not less right so a lot of the language around this new paradigm of water management is that we're going to give up control in some way but here we see that there's actually sort of doubling down on controlling the flows of it in the delta and then obviously even when there is a sort of shift away from a mega project approach towards a more distributed green infrastructure approach there are these problematic aspects of planning and impacts and this is an interview that's also familiar to most of us in the room probably this is the green dot map from the immediate post Katrina moment which because of the sort of it was a proposal to radically de-densify certain low line neighborhoods to accommodate storm water more but these green dots that were that indicate where that was to happen were disproportionately located in low-income African neighborhoods leading some critics to call this a form of ethnic cleansing or race and race class redlining and so the uneven cost and benefits of these adaptation processes inevitably are going to lead to conflict to debate to discussion about who should bear this and so actually Josh is in the room here this is a quote from one of our paper of hands where he's recognizing that even if we do even if we frame these processes as a return to a sort of more ecological approach to managing the delta there's going to be there's inevitable conflict that's going to come with this process I mean but unfortunately what I found is that all too often designers are actually not engaging with these conflicts and many ways we're actually kind of acting as deep politicizing agents to sort of paper over the conflicts rather than to raise them and deal with them which is what needs to happen if we're going to move these processes forward in a fair and just way and so I've identified what I call four tools of design and anti-politics that I'll describe briefly here so what is urgency right this is about a key one so as you know political ecology scholars have told us that sort of mobilizing a sense of existential threat and urgency in the sort of apocalyptic imaginary is a way of can often be a way of evacuating dissent in any kind of major project or proposal that it sort of suggests that essentially there's just no time there's no time to engage with a sort of messy deliberative process because things are just too it's just too urgent right the threat is too urgent the second tool that I'll describe here is this that everyone can win that we can have these massive re-shaping of land use patterns and infrastructural patterns but then in the end everyone's going to win and a favorite tool of designers that we I can turn myself into a planner that we deploy is the photo collage so we can photo collage together people living together happily in any number of environments and it sort of creates an imagined future in which there is no conflict and this is a great example of this from the changing course competition where we imagine these different coastal residents tourists and coastal residents and urban residents and basically they all agree that in spite of this installing all these taps of river that are going to radically reshape the landscape basically everything's cool it doesn't matter it's going to be fine so the urban residents say I don't need to know this and you think different everything seems about the same to me so it's just sort of there's no problem here moving along the third tool that I'll talk about is this idea of landscape essentialism which is to say in many of these processes both in DACA and New Orleans to my sites that I've put most closely at that means really emphasizing the Dantean character of these places and in many ways there's all this conversation about Delta cities, Delta urbanism, Delta planning these were really foregrounds the geophysical similarities between places but it also often has the sort of subsidiary impact of de-emphasizing the sociological and political differences that may exist between otherwise geophysically similar places and one of the things that that does is it sort of creates a process where you can export generic approaches to climate proofing the Dutch have been sort of at the vanguard of this process and then the last tool that I'll talk about is this idea of restorationism which is the idea that what we're doing here even if it is radical it's sort of somehow turning the clock back to a more harmonious way of inhabiting the landscape so that might be changing the Delta back into what it once was or looking to the wisdom of the past in my eyes these restoration narratives can be a way of softening or papering over the uneven cost of benefits that are going to come with it unmaking of the dry city so what's you know on one hand you can very reasonably ask what it's not to like about these three years right so these are urgent problems climate adaptation is urgent of course we should be looking for solutions where everybody went and so of course we should be looking for sort of knowledge sharing between similar similarly situated places around the globe and of course we should be looking for you know cues from the past for ecologically sensitive settlement patterns the problem comes when these frames are used to kind of obscure the obscure conflicts and debates that come up around these radical changes to landscapes and infrastructures and so to me building off this research I argue that designers and spatial planners can and should we should be playing a growing role in these processes but we really need to kind of be reflective about the tools that we use and in particular these are sort of three ways in which I think we can engage more deeply with how how we think about our role in these processes one is to think about adaptation as a long-term process right this is a generation's long process we're entering into there's not going to be a time where cities can sort of check a box and say we're here by now resilient and adaptive climate change so that requires a different way of thinking about how designers engage in these processes which is to say that it is a process we need to build democrat the ability to disagree to debate to deliberate and consider how design can play a role in those processes we need to think about adaptation as not one big solution this needs to be a pluralistic process right where there are it's rooted in plays in history and politics that recognizes that communities have different risk tolerances they have different attitudes towards environmental resources I error message here and then lastly we need to embrace the idea we need to recognize that putting forward images and imaginaries of the future is an inherently political process and that we need to deploy that political power with a little bit more self-reflection and understand whose interest we are advancing when we put forward these images of imagined futures so I think I will leave it there and thank you all so much and I just wanted to remind some of those in the room who may not know this prior to colonization this place where we are now was called the lunch in the Choctaw town which was the Muscogee language the major trade language that was used here in the Delta Bulbancha translates to essentially a place where many languages are spoken and as I look out at this river rolling by so swollen I just want to acknowledge and give thanks for its support in building this new land that we are on geologically it's only been here for a couple thousand years and though what has taken mother nature a couple thousand years to create it's also taken man a couple decades to screw up to a point where we're like oh my god what are we going to do and I think about that a lot again this photograph I start many almost all of my presentations with when I'm talking about Louisiana because it was taken in the Yakni Shido which is between the Yachafalaya and Mississippi Rivers which is experiencing some of the fastest land loss in all of South Louisiana being ground zero for land loss on the planet as well and my two great grandmothers are pictured in the front row here on both sides and I just think that the structure in and of itself says so much not to mention the faces the mud and moss chimney and the palmetto roof and the fact that this was taken in the late 1920s always makes me scratch my head and it was the photograph that my grandmother used to tell me about this place that she was from called Point-au-Chien which means point of the oaks there's also the debate out in the Point-au-Chien Point-au-Chien Point-au-Chien being point of the dog and the oaks a photograph, I mean a map was made by a dear friend and collaborator who's a local artist and resident here in Malwantia, Jacob Rosenzweig and that highlighted part in the middle between the Yachafalaya and Mississippi is essentially the heart of the big country and I always say that the Homa dodged the trail of tears into the Delta and this is where they found their sovereignty and food security most importantly My grandparents migrated to St. Bernard Parish in the 1940s and that was due to a number of reasons, one is that land had been essentially stolen by the land grabbers first the fur trappers and then the oil and gas men who came in and of course this territory had been cut with thousands of miles of canals over the last couple of decades and so my grandparents moved to St. Bernard which is just south about 20 miles from here and that's where I live now in the big toe of south Louisiana though our boot shaped state looks more like a stiletto these days so this is kind of this is a nice idea it doesn't really look that way this image I just want to share and it was taken in 2010 we were doing a flyover during the BP drilling disaster and a lot of south Louisiana's coast looks like this and we don't actually get to see the Spanish because everything is so flat but yeah that's nature does not create straight lines nor does it make zigzags so perfectly so this is some organza to the Gulf a levy system and just outside beyond the terraces that you can see those little speed bumps that were of course man made is Ilde Jean Charles which we've all read a lot about and a lot of my frustration is that so I'm a citizen of the whole nation and a lot of my family lives inside this you know they don't call it letting protection they call it risk reduction so we live inside and as like everything rolled out with the island it was really frustrating and how the media was portraying the island as if it was happening in its own little oasis like destruction and knowing that a mile away my cousins were inside this risk reduction but faced the same long-term challenges of you know being threatened that not all places will be able to be saved and also being kind of given these false senses of security in my opinion by having this infrastructure put in this image was taken in 2008 in a place called Grand Bois which is just north of the fastest disappearing land on the planet and just south of the Gulf Andrew Coastal Waterway and also is you know a couple thousand feet from these open-air oil waste hits where they treat the material it's not hazardous according to Louisiana law but has hazardous characteristics and it can't move from a facility but it's in a flood zone of course those of you who are local know that we've had this and of course this happened up in the northeast after Sandy but these hazard mitigation grants for people to raise their homes this is my cousin Nasty in front of his home after one of the storms one of those twins that came through I think this was Gustav and Ike so 2008 and he's raised his house another 10 feet since then which is one of those things where you're like okay they're raising homes that are they're not like the best constructed homes and putting them 20 feet in the sky and telling folks that they're safe and yes you may be safe from the water but the wind is another story so life in the red zone Anthony Fontno and I have been having these very hosting these informal collective salons since Hurricane Katrina and just having people come together and chat about things and one of the you know we keep going back to is like they're saying everyone should be kind of thinking of moving north but what would it look like to what is life going to look like in the red zone and so this is you know the states like 2050 predictions of land loss of course when Hurricane Katrina came ashore my grandmother was actually home with my father and other family members and an 11 foot storm surge washed into our house in St. Bernard and if you go to my home today you know the memory of that has kind of been erased but the scar is still very much alive in present even though we've had some of the biggest hard infrastructure this is the southeast Louisiana reduction system known as the Chalmet Loop and in the picture it says the underpass is 19 feet but you know this wall the Great Wall of St. Bernard is almost 30 feet in some places and two or three years after they completed it in 2013 you know we've got these reports that in some places this wall had some between three and six feet already and that was a couple of years ago of course the Army Corps put in a management monitoring system that cost like over a million dollars and said don't worry there's nothing to worry about we're just putting this monitoring system in but they failed to paint the sheet piling with that like anti-rest stuff so they just like put it into that like putting soil delta mud so I don't feel very safe even though I'm technically inside this production so these are some images that I just pulled from CQRA in 2017 when I was going to these public meetings they were saying you know the best case scenarios of the 2012 plan sorry the worst case scenarios of the 2012 plan were the best case scenarios of the 2017 plan because sea levels rising so quickly and the modeling was showing mess right and I can't help but like point out that there's a huge coal bar just passing by right now just totally open air just like cruising and that too is headed to flood zone depot just south of here so I think that you know for me here's another so this is just land loss but this is your flooding depths right and this is from again the 2017 plan and I really struggle with you know how we're planning to fund our coastal master plan I also struggle with the title of master plan being that before we had oil and gas and coal depots along the banks of the Mississippi we had cotton and sugar cane and where those plantations once that presents in petro chemical plants now sit and the majority of the funding going to our coastal master plan the reason we have real dollars right now is because we have these deep water horizon disaster funds to go towards these projects but into the infinite future you look at what I highlighted here GOMESA Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act that pot of money is coming from deep water oil and gas extraction so essentially the way the master plan is set up not entirely but you see the numbers here we're leaning really heavy on oil and gas and I think that we need to remember that when we talk about this plan so they have as part of the master plan something called non structural adaptation which actually has everything to do with human being structures so it's you're lifting your house relocating people or flood proofing your businesses this is the island road going to the Illusion Shores and this I found just recently and I just wanted to share it with you all and I just want to point out the logos this is a pocket guide to funding resources for reducing coastal flood risk and as you see Shell is the main funder for putting out this pocket guide and when we look at the fact that Shell is one of the big explorers in the Gulf of Mexico we have about 4,000 active leases of course not all of those are in Shell's hands but what is the relationship between corporations and communities and I'm just going to share a few because I'm running out of time these images that I've been layering US GS maps from the 1930s with 2015 and those little squeaky blue lines were land and now they have blue on top of them because they're water and this is the point of Shell Ridge and this is a photograph of the artifacts that can be found along the ridge but as we're considering these places that are changing so rapidly and not only are the names being changed but also they're being taken off of the maps and when you have oil and gas being part of the process and the planning you know what does that mean into the future and of course we know you know if the oil and gas loves to tell us that you know in South Louisiana you have oil and gas or you have nothing maybe you have colors now a conification of cultures hold their conversation I work with another Gulf as possible and we are currently trying to envision what this place could look like and I think that we have to be honest about how we got here and recognize that yeah we we've learned a lot of lessons we just have to remember them as we move forward and recognize that the colonial system is still very much so in place here in the Mississippi Delta it's just under the corporation but you know the company of the West Indies is why we call this place New Orleans right so yeah with that I will close thank you so much to the organizers for including me in this event and thank you to all of the panelists for sharing the important work that you're doing moving forward to our conversation throughout the rest of the day and so from my response today I was asked to speak about today's themes from a different geographic area of focus so in the next few minutes I'll just share a snippet of a study that I began in New York after Hurricane Sandy telling you the story of a community that came together after the storm and made the difficult decision to disperse itself to retreat rather than to rebuild so I'll focus in particular on conflicts that arose over different ways of defining and managing risk highlighting some of the issues and questions that this case raises are relevant for our discussion today so as some of you might recall Sandy's Coast Landfall occurred the night of October 29th, 2012 and in New York City where I was living at the time I was working on my PhD the borough of Staten Island was one of the parts of the city that was particularly hard hit so it saw the highest recorded water levels, the most deaths in the city and the greatest proportion of residents affected by the borough and this photo is an aerial shot of a neighborhood called Oakwood Beach where you can see that houses were swept completely off their foundations and into the surrounding marsh so one week after Sandy this letter to the editor was published on the website of Staten Island's Daily Newspaper and the letter's author Tina Downer wrote about how she loved her neighborhood very much but she decided that it was no longer the same place to live soon after her letter appeared Tina helped organize a community meeting more than 200 of her neighbors showed up they decided to keep the meeting closed to public officials and the press they only wanted residents of the area present to discuss their future but at that meeting they voted nearly unanimously in favor of pursuing government buyouts of their homes so rather than staying rebuilt they wanted support to be located and for their homes to be demolished and the area permanently restored to wetlands so a process that's becoming known as managed retreat following that meeting Tina and a small group of her neighbors formed a group they called the Oakwood Beach Buyout Committee and they put together a plan for buyouts and they started pushing it to local city and state officials less than three months later in February 2013 New York State's Governor Andrew Cuomo traveled down to Staten Island and announced his support for a pilot buyout of Oakwood Beach he praised the neighborhood for coming together and he said that those who chose to participate in the new program would receive a pre-sorm value of their homes so they saw the condition of many of the houses in that neighborhood and then they also get a set of incentives that get incentives for their collective willingness to move and they get a bonus as they relocated within New York City the first one, news of the Oakwood Beach Buyout Broke it seemed like an anomaly even in places with recurrent disasters people generally do not and do not want to relocate but before long I watched as residents in other neighborhoods along Staten Island's shore that they're all on the beaches committee and started pressing the state to expand its program to include them too so this is a picture that I took in my neighborhood called Ocean Breeze, it's just a little bit up the east shore this is from a meeting I went to in Crescent Beach for your down shore this is from a neighborhood called South Beach close to the Verzano Bridge one of the signs says Governor Cuomo senior, sick, tired, broke, buy me out please and this is a picture I took in the Grand Beach where one man put signs all around his house asking for a buyout this says Governor Cuomo, mother nature wants to land back buy us out and give it back weeks and months after Sandy these buyout groups emerged all along the shore asking the state to demolish neighborhoods that some of their members had called home for generations but despite this widespread support for buyouts among residents themselves not everyone in the city thought that redrawing the coastborn in this way was a good idea so New York City's mayor at the time Michael Bloomberg who often spoke of himself as the mayor to have reclaimed in his terms the waterfront for development came up very strongly against retreat which he cast as an unnecessary abandonment of the coast rather than unbilled in the face of growing risk the mayor wanted to do the opposite so the city created this plan that would offer homeowners that wanted to locate roughly the same amount of money for their homes but with the right to auction the land off to the highest bidder someone who promised to rebuild in a flood resilient manner rather than permanently unbuilding the land as the state program promised but selling one's land for redevelopment so that as some people put it to me a wealthy person could live there instead felt very different in giving it back to mother nature which many on Staten Island cast as a kind of sacrifice for the greater good so they spoke of it as giving up their land to create a natural buffer of open space that would help protect their neighbors their larger community further inland as well as protect taxpayers at large from paying out again and future disaster aid and insurance claims so to mediate these competing government programs and conflicting visions of the future coast the city and the state at first proposed using FEMA's flood maps as a way to decide which places were risky enough to warrant retreat so homeowners in zone V the highest risk area were told that they'd be eligible to apply for buyouts to the state although in zone A at the same risk of flooding but a little bit lesser risk of storm surge could apply to sell their land to the city for eventual redevelopment this proposal proved enormously controversial which probably won't surprise any of you familiar with FEMA's flood insurance rate maps first of all because FEMA's maps which were in the process of being revised in New York City when Sandy hit did not take the storm's damage into account of that damage so as has become a familiar story in many places including here in Louisiana in New York City alone more than 21 square miles of flooded land during Sandy lay outside of FEMA's 100 year flood zone but people also took issue with the way that by presenting risk as the static attribute of a place FEMA's maps worked to naturalize that risk into a race that's historical production so older residents in particular would often talk to me about a time when the line between land and water in their neighborhoods was far less clear cut now when a home sat like this some pilings in the wetlands and the creeks flowed in and out between them this is a photo that one resident showed me of how his neighborhood used to look but now with the wetlands and creeks filled in people who recall the way it used to be blame the chronic flooding that this neighborhood now experiences on the fact that the water simply has nowhere left to go part of the reason that people did not want their land to be developed once they left was because they blamed past development decisions for having produced flood risk over time so the man on the right in this photo he's standing in his backyard and he said it was exactly the kind of resilient new development favored by the city that it contributed to the damage his own house suffered during Sandy so he's standing here in front of what he called the wrong way to seawall that protected this new townhouse development adjacent to his backyard during the storm but displaced water onto his family's own small and bungalow destroying it in the houses of their neighbors so the plan to use FEMA's maps to delineate the boundaries and buy out areas frustrated people because the lines of risk on the maps transgress social boundaries they divided neighborhoods, they divided streets, they divided attached houses and also buy out groups that had already been organizing making their own maps as you can see here of houses in their neighborhoods whose owners wanted to sell and for a number of reasons it ultimately became clear that FEMA's maps did not provide workable boundaries for retreat and the state wound up relying largely on residents own boundaries to define the two additional areas they eventually selected as eligible so this case shows you know on the one hand the retreat does not have to be top down or forced it can and indeed should be locally organized to have a process that gives people a sense of agency and control. Retreat is about moving collectives as well as individuals and to be effective at reducing risk and not to mention sustaining cultures and social ties it depends on collective action this is a photo of some of the houses that are part of the Oakwood Beach buyout and you can see that in this case people were literally attached to one another and in some cases you know they didn't actually much like their neighbors but they did care deeply what their neighbors did and when it seemed like everyone on the block wanted to go pursuing a buyout that came away kind of paradoxically to affirm one's belonging and a sense of social identity not abandoning it it's important to look critically at which identities and ways of life were affirmed, valued and protected through the buyout process so those who succeeded at getting bought out of Staten Island you know was a fraction of those who organized but they were predominantly white working in middle class homeowners who had the political power and connections to get their demands heard and to some degree at least met by the system as it stands so they had what anthropologist Elizabeth Moreno terms adaptation privilege afforded through policies like buyouts that are premised on property ownership and thus disproportionately excluded the poor and people of color so exactly those who are disproportionately affected by swarms like Sandy and other effects of climate change and planning for the future that doesn't take into account the unable landscapes that already exist threatens to obviously compound adaptation or compounded equality and division through the process of adaptation Staten Island who were in a position of relative privilege being in one of the wealthiest cities and one of the wealthiest countries in the world resources to retreat proved incredibly hard to come by so for these subsequent neighborhoods that did get bought out it was only after eight months and in one case more than a year just kind of constant organizing and pressure and lettering campaigns and demonstrations and so on buyouts of high upfront costs and there are no clear guidelines for how to distribute buyout funding decisions about how to do so can easily lead to conflict this was the case with FEMA's maps and the subsequent kinds of criteria that followed which divided communities are seen as opaque, undemocratic or unjust and as sites around the world become more exposed to floods, storms and sea level rise a lot of other impacts people might expect retreat to be based on physical geography primarily so on factors like elevation like proximity to the coast but in practice it's based as much on political, social, economic geography we see retreat represented increasingly now as inevitable and even desirable for some places these are typically places that have a long history of being viewed as expendable or peripheral a point Carol Farrabacco a geographer makes in relation to small island nations of an article called wishful sinking but in other places in urban centers like New York City retreat even though it's happening is still largely rejected as an impossibility viewed as antithetical to progress and an unthinkable inversion of manifest destiny in spite of the extreme environmental risk but the demands that I heard in Staten Island after Sandy point to somewhat of a paradigm shift in which even urban areas typically conceptualized in terms of growth are beginning to grapple with the idea of retreat as the climate changes people are moving but there are vast differences in inequities and what that movement looks like and how it's experienced people will be forced out by rising flood insurance rates or exclusion from investments in coastal protection who will remain in limbo as many people in Staten Island still feel they are gradually displaced only to wind up some more potentially even more at risk and who will be enabled to retreat and resettle on their own terms so as climate change increasingly intrudes on everyday life the disruption that results depends not only on the extent of warming and its effects but also on how those effects are measured, mapped and managed and it remains to be seen whether retreat and the face of climate change works to further entrench inequality or conversely can foster forms of collective movement that are capable of being both just and sustainable thank you I'd like to invite any of you who are moving to respond to these extraordinary provocations to raise a hand I just have a policy question national flood insurance program is about to undergo a major methodological change where it's more micro risk based, hide at the house rainfall conditions any insights of how this is going to play out what impacts you I've written about this a little bit and so there is this kind of move away because the maps have proved so kind of impossible to you know the maps were considered good enough for a long time so long as they understated as much risk as they overstated and it kind of balanced out but as you have these pressures to raise insurance to remove subsidies and raise premiums to market rates now suddenly if the maps accuracy takes on higher stakes with people that are on one side of the line or the other and so on so there's a group called stock FEMA now organizing and starting in New Jersey after Sandy and is spread across the country and there's been a lot of activism fighting the new maps and fighting the increased premiums and a lot of the meetings I would go to people would turn to me right away and say are you zone A or zone B we're kind of organizing around this and now as you mentioned there is a shift towards doing much more individualistic kinds of risk scores and moving away from initially the 100 year flood zone entirely and you know my sense is that the question I have I guess is what that means for organizing because I think the maps were very powerful and kind of creating a sense of a shared flood zone identity and did prove a powerful way for people to organize and it was something where neighbors who wouldn't necessarily talk to one another about their financial situations were really willing to disclose their flood zone and it was something that people had in common and so I think there are a lot of questions about what it means kind of socially to share to do a much more individual system I would just say as part of the work we're doing we are looking at some of these fast growing parishes places like Ascension Parish where you really had 90 plus percent of the population that was flooded without flood insurance and moving forward what we found is that they've kind of grasped onto some of these elements of a flood insurance program that really don't make sense which is to say if you fill a development high enough and get it out of the flood zone you get a map and then you don't have to have flood insurance and the parishes have really grabbed onto that but of course what that does is flood all the communities around it and to my knowledge and based on the work we've been doing that is not going to change it is individualistic but it still pits instead of one community against another depending on one development section is against another and I've had the chance to see what it looks like to put 10 feet of fill on a development site that is building 300 homes and it's pretty astonishing another question and how funding works to shape how all these issues are talked about I think academia and MVAs do a really good a good job of identifying the issues and what we need to do to move forward however how we receive funding can limit how we talk about the issue in truth that really allows us to speak truth to power to contribute to grainwashing and create goodwill for entities that are contributing to a problem and limit the ability for people to hold those entities accountable one quick response to that I've been looking at is the growing old private plan for being driving scale around the country around the world partly because the levels of funding for state government are not anywhere close to that to do this work in many ways it's been a positive to the private plan whether that's the rock and dollar or president or others but as you say all of those resources come with particular ideological orientations and I think it is really critical that we think about what it means when the funding for this stuff is coming and what issues are not democratically accountable and what kind of visions get advanced and what kind of processes get advanced because of those where that money comes from so yeah that's yeah I mean I think about funding a lot and as a working artist here in South Louisiana even it's like oh am I going to do an exhibition here and who is it Helis or is it Shell and when you have the New Orleans Jazz brought to you by Shell and I think in this place like New Orleans a bunch of you know we have this you know people have this idea of what this place is and they immediately think that they're not from here crawfish and cajuns and bourbon street they don't think that 25% of the nation's oil and gas is dependent on this place and we talk about those at the ends of the road who are facing these huge river diversions to come in and totally change the hydrology and change the way of life and everything the decisions as we've heard the decisions are getting made from the top down and the people who are in the room helping to make those decisions are often the corporations and in a place like South Louisiana in a place like Louisiana where the government you know we can talk about the institution but when we're talking about our actual government is so deeply connected to these funding streams you know saying climate change is kind of like they're saying it in whispers now which is a good thing but I mean I think that yeah what does that mean when the coast is brought to you urban I don't know how that works you know and I don't think that we're talking about that enough like I go to these meetings where there's hundreds of people and they're like oh I'm asked for a plan I don't want to play but they're not like hey in the funding stream by the way you know so yeah I think we need to say it out loud now for sure and recognize how much influence they have on community I'm from St. Bernard Parish right so we have some of the worst air quality in the nation we have two major ore refineries had to drive by them I got to drive by them going home and we're a blue collar coast so people are like day to day just trying to make ends meet and there are these multinational corporations that are reaping the benefits big time and we have some of the worst air quality in the nation you know well where we are is probably some of the worst air quality in the nation though you know the tourism board probably doesn't want you to know that we need to deep breath our next panel is that right so let me I'm going to take the privilege to give you the last word the question of risk defining risk for closures creates the solution and the flood maps I think are a great example of that the big flaw often identified with the flood insurance rate maps is that they don't reflect actuarial risk they don't and that the movement to improve their definition of risk is to say well the market will therefore operate properly people have since understood their risk is paid an actuarial rate the market would dictate proper decisions as if the problems that we face here or that we didn't have enough of the operation of the free market but by defining by defining the problem as the government is intervene too dramatically in the market to try to create a kind of safety for homeowners if that's the problem and the well there's no possible solution at all similarly I'm so struck by the urban resident whose goal the problem the risk that he poses that life might change too much the idea that somehow in New Orleans or Louisiana or America the problem that most people would face is that nothing would is that something might change strikes me as totally opposite to most people's conditions for most people the status quo is catastrophic right now they want dramatic change and sometimes I ask my students to do the thought experiment of would you rather live in a just world with rising seas would you rather stop the seas from rising and continue with the inequalities that we have today and for most people this doesn't actually take very long to decide which they want we just we have the sense that even if we were to solve rising seas in global warming with a kind of technocratic top-down autocratic technocratic solution we know that that will fail us in the future our most enlightened plans for the future always fail and if we face this the possibility of democracy to address the new problem then we're just get the next time if that makes any sense um I say one more thing about the launch of because I think this is an important thing I'm obsessed with whether the place for many languages is supposed to mean a kind of cosmopolitanism or something more like battle do we live in a place that's defined by a kind of ability to connect to cross difference is that the origin story of Louisiana or is it a total inability to understand each other and we better aspire for the former because that is to my mind that's the biggest risk that we're threatened by is that that inability to understand each other the affirmation of the status quo and market as the solution to the problem that it's actually causing in the first place so I'll leave it there and say good thing we have all day to get to the solutions and I'll turn things over to my colleague now and after that