Flood hazards, environmental rewards, and the social reproduction of risk

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8946679
AutoresGreg Oulahen (Toronto Metropolitan University, autor correspondente)
Ano2021
Volume119
Páginas43-51
Data de publicação2021-01-10
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoGeoforum (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0016-7185 • E-ISSN: 1872-9398
EditoraElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.12.021
OpenAlexW3118430673
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas11
Referências citadas34

People pursue the environmental rewards that come with proximity to water despite associated flood risks. Governments are complicit in this exposure to flood hazards and prevailing institutional arrangements support it, begging the question of why all these actors keep making decisions that serve to reproduce risk in a society that should know better. This paper seeks to address the question by broadening the ontology of social reproduction. It draws on three disparate “imaginaries” of risk—the production of risk, risk and the social contract, and risk at the intersection of capital and rule—to make conceptual links between the production of nature, capitalist production, and social reproduction. This approach is then applied to a study of flood risk on Toronto Island, Canada. Investigating how residents there interact with environmental amenities and acute flood hazards, and how those institutionally-supported interactions are shaped by the Indigenous, environmental, and recent histories of the island, calls for a broadened social reproduction theory to hold together the general and the particular in the contingent geographies of risk. It reveals that flood risk is socially reproduced by processes working in concert to facilitate powerful groups of people in their pursuit of environmental rewards while marginalizing others, exclude some groups of people from the social contract, and situate risk as an organizing point around which lopsided bets are made within the capitalist political economy

Economics · Environmental ethics · Flood myth · Geography · Political science · Politics · Production (economics · Reproduction · Social capital · Social reproduction · Social science · Sociology · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration · Disaster Management and Resilience · Ecology · Flood Risk Assessment and Management · Law