Urban Organizations and Infrastructure in New York’s Experience of Hurricane Sandy

• In Event: 331 - Section on Environment and Technology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 07. Disasters

Abstract

In this working paper, we draw from our ongoing research on the social and spatial inequalities of Hurricane Sandy’s impacts on the New York and of the ongoing recovery and urban “resiliency” work that has followed. In particular, we focus here on the role of organizational cultures and decision-making at different scales and what they can tell us about the uneven performance of certain infrastructure, public services, and relief and recovery efforts across the Sandy-affected region. We examine how the social particularities of these factors shape Sandy’s uneven impacts across communities at two different levels of analysis: (1) the ways that organizational cultures and internal decision-making influenced the performance of electrical grids, transportation systems, and communication networks during the storm; and (2) how local organizational capacities, preexisting social infrastructure, and grassroots innovation shaped community-based recovery efforts in the days and weeks that followed. In doing so, we begin to refine a conceptual framework for the organizational and infrastructural analysis of extreme weather events in major urban areas and suggest some of the broader implications of our findings for understanding what is likely to be the increasingly common collision between extreme weather and large coastal cities outside of regions more heavily studied in hazards research.

Authors

• Gordon C.C. Douglas, New York University

• Liz Koslov, New York University

• Eric Klinenberg, New York University