Rethinking Community Resilience

Rethinking Community Resilience is a critical, timely account about the effects and limits of community action in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Transcending the neighborhoods-in-the-lead narratives that dominated New Orleans’s recovery, Min Hee Go’s sobering findings illuminate how resident action alone could not overcome the structural racism that led to unequal disaster effects and inequitable recoveries, and how neighborhood scale successes could lead to exclusionary redevelopment and reduce resilience in other ways. As the memory of Hurricane Katrina recedes, the relationships between neighborhoods and local public action in Rethinking Community Resilience are more relevant than ever for researchers, planners, policymakers alike who are investigating neighborhood change and facing disaster recovery and climate adaptation. ~Renia Ehrenfeucht, co-author of Urban Revitalization: Remaking Cities in a Changing World

Within the context of both climate change and long-term population decline, Rethinking Community Resilience examines how well-intentioned community led recovery efforts in post-Katrina New Orleans were often incomplete and haphazard, deepening pre-crisis inequities and increasing the city’s overall susceptibility to future risk. Min Hee Go interrogates the romanticized notion that civic action can uniformly fill the void created by incompetent or weakened government and enable residents to overcome crises and create more resilient communities. ~Marla K. Nelson, Associate Professor, University of New Orleans