“Recovery after Disasters: New Orleans, Paris, and Memphis“
Studies in Emergent Order, Vol. 4 (2011)
Abstract
Emily Chamlee-Wright‘s The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery synthesizes research showing that governments at all levels blocked the ―Road Home‖ for Hurricane Katrina‘s victims. These policies have worked against the apparently natural inclination of citizens to immediately start rebuilding their communities after natural disasters. Chamlee-Wright and others show that post-disaster policy played a pivotal role in determining what filled the civil society vacuums that emerged in Katrina‘s wake. We apply Chamlee-Wright‘s framework of cultural and political economy to aspects of two previous disasters: the 1878 Memphis Yellow Fever Epidemic and the 1910 Great Flood of Paris.
Studies in Emergent Order 