Remaking place after ‘disaster’

Abstract

Remaking place after 'disaster'A few months after Hurricanes Irma and Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico I was driving around Detroit with Luisa 1 , an acquaintance of mine who lives on the island, "Man," she said, "Now parts of PR look like Detroit.They're just gone."Her words were similar to others' description of shattered windows, collapsed foundations, and broken roofs in the days following the storm, including Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rosselló during an interview, "Once we flew over the island it looked like a bomb hit Puerto Rico.It was just all wiped out."I do not conduct fieldwork in Puerto Rico.Like many, I followed the storms' sweep and aftermath through news reports supplemented by sporadic social media posts and messages from friends living on the island.Even before that car ride with Luisa, in scrolling through articles and news feeds I was struck by their similarity with descriptions of my field sites in Detroit, where I have spent several years examining the causes and consequences of vacant building demolition.The theme of disaster is resonant in Detroit, with an estimated fifty thousand empty buildings described as the result of the city "having suffered an economic disaster rather than a natural one."Though vibrant and safe neighborhoods exist in Detroit, their presence tends to be overshadowed by accounts of unoccupied homes, warehouses, stores, and factories described as "bombed out" and "a hurricane without water."I briefly dwell on these instances here to consider how reworking the physical remains of destructive processes enlivens them as sites of competing spatial futures.The intersections between efforts to grapple with vacant buildings in Detroit and severe weather events in Puerto Rico are more than metaphorical.In each place, political leaders 1 Per anthropological convention, I use pseudonyms to identify my interlocutors.

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