ABSTRACT
This volume has traversed several themes related to urban vulnerabilities, their productions, and the material, ecological, economic, political, and cultural consequences of being made vulnerable. Each chapter has, in its own way, expanded conceptualizations of vulnerability from a point-in-time assessment and a static condition to a dynamic, multi-scalar historical process driven by context-specific interactions. Urban vulnerabilities are produced by geographies of wealth and risk accumulation governed by neoliberal policies and resource management practices in relation to urban fires and city parks; through the displacement of risk and the influence of disaster capitalism enabled by global north-south institutional arrangements; through sustainability planning efforts and environmental movements which concentrate benefits for the least vulnerable populations while exacerbating and creating new risks for already vulnerable populations; through activism that calls attention to future vulnerabilities associated with climate change, yet places activists at risk to psychological and physical harm; and through the confluence of segregationist politics and urban land economics that maintain risk to natural hazards for minority populations. Responses to the production of urban vulnerabilities – whether in the form of urban policy strategies intended to re-frame vulnerable conditions and re-purpose vulnerable urban spaces or in the form of political mobilization among historically marginalized and disempowered groups of women – point to the opportunities and potentials for resisting and even reversing vulnerable conditions and their associated processes of production. Capacity for resistance and reversing the production processes can be framed as a form of resilience, another theme explored by two contributors.
