Weathering the storm: The politics of urban climate change adaptation planning

Abstract

On 17 August 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall in East Texas. Over a four-day period, catastrophic flooding displaced 30,000 people and led to at least 50 deaths. While much of the media coverage of this extreme weather event was concerned with immediate impacts (see, for example, Sanchez et al., 2017), there were also rumblings about the role of city planning, or lack thereof, in the devastating floods experienced in Houston (Boburg and Reinhard, 2017). City officials’ resistance to enacting more stringent building codes; stalled progress on flood-control projects; city residents’ rejection of city-wide zoning; the paving of coastal and prairie wetlands; lack of comprehensive flood planning across the 34 municipalities of Harris County, which includes Houston; and other aspects of physical geography collectively may have facilitated the perfect storm (Boburg and Reinhard, 2017). Houston, however, is not alone in its zeal for rapid, unregulated, urban development. The shunning of state regulation and public sector-led planning in favor of ‘‘neoliberal urbanism’’ is underway globally, albeit in different forms (Harvey, 2011; Peck et al., 2009; Theodore et al., 2011). Scholars have explored this urban phenomenon in American cities for decades (see, for example, Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Hackworth, 2007; Smith, 2002). We see similar political economy patterns internationally. A defining characteristic of contemporary urban development in many Asian cities, for example, is the relative power of the private sector in urban and regional planning and the weakening of existing land development codes (Marks and Lebel, 2016; Shatkin, 2008). Take, for example, the Indonesian property developer, Ciputra, who built a 1200 hectare upscale waterfront development in an area specified in Jakarta’s land use plan as ‘‘protected green zone’’ and ‘‘off-limits’’ for development (Leaf, 2015). In Thailand, weakening of existing land development codes has enabled the overbuilding of Bangkok, particularly in ‘‘green zones’’ and in floodways, with serious implications for urban flooding (Marks and Lebel, 2016). Interestingly, the field of climate change adaptation has, for the most part, developed independently of critical urban studies scholarship and planning theory, despite the placebased nature of adaptation actions. This disconnect may stem from the fact that climate change adaptation research evolved out of studies of the biophysical impacts of