Cities Under Siege

Many essays dealing with the urban city in response to disaster, commissioned by the SSRC, are now on a special web site on Understanding Karina through the social sciences.

'Cities Under Siege:Katrina and the Politics of Metropolitan America' is one such essay on this site.


"Even Hollywood, so skilled in fantastical depictions of urban apocalypse, would have struggled to imagine the horrors of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. As well as resonating unnervingly with staples of urban doom in popular culture, the tragedy has remorselessly exposed some of the darker sides of metropolitan USA in the Bush era. It has acted as a window revealing how decades of Federal urban disinvestment, exurbanization and White Flight have helped leave large swathes of the central cores of US cities demonised, neglected and increasingly abandoned. The tragic consequences of Bush's recent efforts to radically reduce the public service efforts of the Federal State in the mitigation of natural catastrophes have emerged in startling focus. Katrina has revealed the deep and troubling politics surrounding varying definitions of the 'security' of metropolitan America with uncompromising clarity. Finally, Katrina has underlined the ironies and contradictions that run through the politics and geopolitics of the Bush administrations' post 9/11 strategy with unprecedented power."