UC Berkeley

Under the perils of climate collapse, urban environmental governance has increasingly deployed adaptation and mitigation policies to secure cities’ ecological and material reproduction—the “urban ecological security” framework. According to hydrogeological algorithms, people living in areas at risk of landslides and flooding should repeatedly be displaced from their homes. However, what governments consider unfit dwellings for human habitation are spaces of domestic reconstruction where new forms of collective life emerge. In Brazil alone, risk areas deemed “uninhabitable” are home to 8.27 million people. In Sao Paulo, this pattern has increased over the last decade. In dialogue with scholars of the global South, this essay focuses on a squatter camp in the northern periphery of Sao Paulo, where Black and Brown women have rebuilt their livelihoods while facing the risk of floods and evictions. This disproportionate impact of climate change on specific communities derives from certain regimes of government under which people put their lives in danger to escape socio-economic risks while facing a dearth of low-income housing policies and a rampant rental market. Adaptation strategies like evictions might worsen their already-severe conditions of survival. In this essay, I argue that understanding the distributional injustice of flooding under climate collapse means going beyond hydrogeological algorithms that objectivize individuals as lives at risk to be evicted. It means providing accounts from the ground to study the economies and networks of subsistence that emerge from occupying risk areas. Evicting people impacted by climate collapse without ensuring continuity of their resources might likely push them back to a path of continuous displacement and persistent poverty.