Reading in the dark: Shifting governmentalities and the spatial dimensions of legible U.S. flood risk

Abstract

Following the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, U.S. private insurers abandoned flood coverage after deeming it incalculable, precipitating the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) in 1968. The NFIP continued to underwrite illegible risk in the public interest. For decades, hydraulic models were limited to simplified “one-dimensional” simulations ill-equipped to characterize uncertainty to the standard of market carriers. However, recent advancements in multidimensional characterization have galvanized the flood sector. The NFIP has licensed some of the most expansive 2-D models to date from eager tech firms; it has pledged to modernize its risk portfolio, invest in financing, and attract private carriers in order to “lift all boats” within the flood sector. This article intervenes by examining the “multidimensional turn” as a fix for “crises of calculation.” The article rejects teleological narratives crediting models for “changing how we think” about flood, and illustrates how underwriters enframe illegible floodplains as unruly problems. The incalculability of flood risk is an “insurantial logic” naturalized as a physical truth. Economic geographers have interrogated the materiality of such truths as integral to the production of nature under capitalism. The article examines how invested state and non-state actors operationalize impediments to legible risk to realize their financial interests. It further argues that FEMA’s costly efforts to realize an allusive market are undermined by intractable conflicts between pure-market and affordable coverage. The NFIP will likely continue to do the heavy lifting with respect to underwriting, and selective geographies of private coverage will mirror the drive for surplus value.