Designing Urban Futures: Technopolitical Landscapes of Resilience in Miami-Dade County

• In Event: Assembling Resilience - II

Abstract

Resilience has become a key organizing principle for urban governance in the Miami region. Local governments have adopted planning tools developed through the 100 Resilient Cities program, such as Arup’s City Resilience Framework, to reconceptualize government initiatives in terms of their contribution to four resilience components – health and wellbeing, economy and society, infrastructure and environment, and leadership and strategy. Critical scholars have critiqued such indices for rendering urban problems technical matters subject to detached expert control. However, far less attention has been paid to the contextually-specific ways multiple actors strategically engage with and take up resilience tools and devices within wider struggles over urban governance. This paper brings together STS work on technopolitics with Simondon’s critique of cybernetics to approach resilience planning in Miami as a site of contestation over how the urban can be known and governed. Resilience techniques enable practitioners and activists to visualize multiple forms of resilience that index distinct visions of a future “resilient Miami.” These differences revolve around the formation of at least two affected publics: first, undifferentiated “Miami residents” in need of infrastructural and institutional innovations to protect the region’s real estate market from rising seas and economic turbulence; second, spatially and socially segregated “vulnerable residents” in need of institutional changes that transform decision-making processes and address longstanding, racially-differentiated inequalities and insecurities. Resilience techniques are thus indeterminate vectors in wider struggles over how urban governance can visualize and address past, present and future insecurities.

Author

• Kevin Grove, Florida International University