UCLA

Resilience planning, in framing environmental and social relations as interdependent and interrelated, risks perpetuating inequalities unless the question of justice is central to those plans. In the absence of a clear focus on justice, different priorities can give rise to ongoing inequalities even when those priorities fall under the framework of resilience. Confronting the underlying politics of resilience planning and design entails accounting for the ways in which the implementation of resilience can exacerbate inequality. Guiding this dissertation is an environmental justice framework that centralizes systemic inequality and active and violent exclusion of certain populations and communities as the cause of the vulnerabilities faced by frontline and fenceline communities. Within this framework I pursue three distinct avenues of research related to resilience planning and design. The first paper evaluates resilience plans adopted by cities in the US. I analyze the content of thirty-eight resilience plans by US cities in order to reveal how cities define resilience, how cities conceptualize goals and implementation strategies in order to achieve resilience, how cities involve the public in formulating their plans, and how cities address equity through resilience framings. The second paper pays close attention to how resilience, as a concept and project, scales down from the city to the neighborhood, using Los Angeles as a case study. Through my research on the Watts community of South Los Angeles, I examine how resilience plans and strategies, which were conceived of and generated at the city level, are then adopted, understood, implemented, and contested at the finer scale of the neighborhood. I look at how resilience is taken up by community activists and stakeholders who attempt to address existing, historic, and systemic inequalities by appropriating and contesting resilience projects. The third paper addresses resilience design as a process and product that envisions climate just futures, and asks what these processes mean for populations and regions most vulnerable to climate risks. The study analyzes the nine proposals that resulted from the Resilient by Design project in California’s Bay Area, and focuses specifically on the intersection of resilience design and equity.