Speakers
Description
Drawing on studies by complexity theorists, sociologists, historians and political ecologists, the paper proposes a critical and evolutional understanding (poly)crises (e.g. floods, fires, earthquakes, environmental contamination) at the intersection with socio-territorial inequalities in the global society of risk. Crises and disasters are hence critically analyzed in their socio-political and governance dimensions, considering how they are socially constructed, implying they exist only when certain actors declare and operationalize them as such. While crises are often approached as emergencies limited to specific events (disasters), our paper proposes to consider a wider time frame, looking at long-standing processes of unevenness in order to better understand punctual events. In this light, punctual events or key decisions related to disasters can become critical junctures within longer trajectories of crisis. Moreover, crises are new sources of territorialisation, both in term of actors’ practices and state action. Given the (variably explicit) spatial dimension of (poly-)crises such as those related to floods, earthquakes, fires or epidemics, we propose to consider them as “territorial crises”, investing multiple geographical scales and manifesting through practices of state-promoted redlining and zoning in response to emergencies. As shown by political economists and state theorists, “territorial crises” have been a privileged site for the deployment of state projects, understood as coherent templates ‘within which individual agents and organs of the state can coordinate and judiciously combine (collibrate) policies and practices, and also connect diverse policies to pursue (a more or less illusory) national interest, public good, and social welfare’ (Jessop 2016).
In previous studies the authors of the paper have been investigating “territorial crises” and the possibility to consider them as the site for the launch of new state projects, showing how specific actors within the state apparatus are granted extraordinary powers through the alteration of established multi-level inter-institutional arrangements, specific and evolving geographies for the implementation of state response are designated, and specific regimes of indemnisation are identified, thus defining broader rules of inclusion/exclusion. Today, the paper’s authors are observing how the increasing frequency of extreme events and the growing complexity of polycrises have been exceeding the capacity of state actors to respond to them in multiple geographical contexts, from fire-ravaged Los Angeles to the repeatedly flood-hit Romagna region in Italy.
More in particular, more frequent and more damaging catastrophes are putting very intense pressure on the long-term financial sustainability of public, public-private, and private insurance systems across the globe. Such a new normal implies an increased risk of insurances insolvency and growing premiums for clients, or complete withdrawal from some territories and social groups, combined with the emergence of a “climate housing bubble” produced by the underestimation of the impact of risks on the value of properties. New socio-spatial cleavages result from these trends, confirming or reshaping inherited geographies of risk and inequality. In Italy, where it has been the state to traditionally address post-disaster reconstruction financial needs, the more frequent pace and intensity of disasters is putting into question the sustainability of traditional forms of state intervention. In particular, the national government has recently advanced the idea of a compulsory insurance scheme for homeowners against all sorts of disasters – floods, earthquakes - to which the country is particularly prone. Such a proposal, soon withdrawn from the government, was put forward amid an unprecedented wave of floods that affected the area of Romagna, in the north-east of the country.
Based on this reasoning, and drawing from past and more contemporary cases, the paper presents a critical discussion of the evolving understandings of state responsibility facing disasters in Italy.
References
Centemeri, L., Tomassi, I. (2022), “Disasters and catastrophes”, in Pellizzoni, L., Leonardi, E., Asara, V. (eds.), Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics, Edward Elgar Publisher, Cheltenham.
Coppola, A., Di Giovanni, G., Fontana, C. (2021), “Prolific, but undemanding. The state and the post-disaster reconstruction of a small regional capital: the case of L’Aquila, Italy”, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 103:3, 235-252.
Coppola, A. (2023), "Dalla questione urbana alla 'nuova questione territoriale'. Alcune note sulle diseguaglianze socio-spaziali in Italia", Città in controluce, 41, 50-73.
Jessop, B. (2016), The State: Past, Present and Future, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.
Leonardi, E., Pellizzoni, L. (2023), “Governmentality and political ecology”, in Walters, W., Tazzioli, M. (eds.), Handbook on governmentality, Edward Elgar Publisher, Cheltenham.
Morin, E. (2016), Pour une crisologie, L’Herne, Paris.
Pessina, G. (2021), “Fragility, environmental risks and territorial safeguard. Transdisciplinary perspectives from inner areas”, in Dezio, C. et al. (eds.), Inner Areas in Italy. A testbed for interpreting and designing marginal territories, ListLab, Trento.
| Keywords | climate housing bubble; disasters; inequalities; risk insurance; territorial crises |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
