Knowledge Bank

In the context of individualized costs that most people lack the spare resources to meet on their own, disasters present an opportunity for the re-assertion of power relations over informal spaces and practices through a discourse of resilience. In post-Hurricane Sandy Canarsie, Brooklyn, the discourse of resilience and the programs and organizations through which it was produced and dispersed targeted basement rentals as spaces ineligible for recovery funding, leaving homeowners who relied on basement rental income to pay their mortgages in danger of foreclosure. Some residents reconstituted the discourse of resilience to fit the material conditions of their everyday lives, using rebuild funds specifically demarcated for other areas of the house to repair their basements, or choosing to attempt to do the repair work themselves. These ‘counter-resilient’ resident practices conflicted with the intentions of disaster recovery groups. The inability to acquire funding to repair these spaces resulted in the residents resorting to further informal practices to retain their houses. Drawing on two months of field work in Canarsie, I argue that these practices of counter-resilience produce and reproduce informal spaces that are excluded from the mainstream discourse of resilience.