An extreme city, according to Ashley Dawson, is a city in which extremes of rich and poor render it unable to deal with extreme weather events.
In case of storm and flood, the rich people on the high ground almost always get priority over the poor people down by the waterfront—what Dawson calls climate apartheid.
And the people who live in rich places, such as Houston, who are mostly lighter-skinned, get priority over the poorer places, such as Port-au-Prince or San Juan, who are mostly darker-skinned.
Beyond this, Dawson wrote, the incentives of a market economy will almost always favor real estate development over public safety.
The best way to protect cities from high water is to pull back from the shoreline and create or expand wetlands to sponge up the high water.
But property developers, not to mention individual homeowners, want seawalls to protect their investments and enable them to recover their sunk costs. Our economic system is based on continued growth. There is no incentive system for pulling back.
Dawson said this is as true of New York City, where he lives, as it is of any city in the world.
This is no small thing. Nearly half the world’s 7 billion people now live in cities. Virtually all of them are on ocean coastlines or other bodies of water. In the Global South, drought is driving increasing numbers of poor people off the land and into urban slums.
Dawson does not view global warming as a doom we can avoid if we try hard enough. He sees it as an emergency that is already upon us, and that most of us are unprepared for.
He does not view it as merely a scientific and technical problem. He says it is a social justice issue—a question of who drowns (usually the poor and dark-skinned) and who is saved (usually the rich and light-skinned)
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When Superstorm Sandy was about to hit New York City in 2012, the city government told residents of the potential flood areas to evacuate. Soon after subway service was shut down, which meant that those without cars were stranded in their neighborhoods. Soon after high water left thousands without access to electricity and heat, or to essential supplies.
The first responders were volunteers, including veterans of the Occupy Wall Street movement, who reconstituted themselves as Occupy Sandy. They did whatever it took to provide food and water and rescue stranded elderly and disabled people on upper floors of apartment buildings.
The official disaster relief agencies showed up only a few days date and, according to Dawson, were happy to make use of Occupy Sandy and other volunteers, but reluctant to help or share information. The reason, he said, is that the official organizations are engaged in a dog-eat-dog competition for funding and don’t want any of their rivals to gain an advantage.
Dawson wrote that when Mayor Michael Bloomberg showed up at the flood-stricken Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn, the only people he wanted to talk to were the business owners. They were the ones who got the funds to rebuild. The neighborhood and Occupy Sandy leaders were brushed aside.
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