About This Unit

"Natural disaster" is among the most effective phrases ever devised for evading responsibility. This unit examines what disasters actually reveal: that vulnerability is socially produced and racially distributed long before any storm forms. The unit's central case is Hurricane Katrina — not as a 2005 event but, following historian Andy Horowitz, as a century-long history in which decisions about levees, oil canals, public housing, and insurance determined who drowned in 2005 and who could return afterward. Eric Klinenberg's "social autopsy" of the 1995 Chicago heat wave supplies the method: when hundreds die in a heat emergency, the deaths map onto segregation, isolation, and disinvestment with terrible precision — the disaster discloses the city that was already there.

The unit's second movement follows displacement and recovery: who is moved, who is moved back, and who profits in between. Katrina scattered Black New Orleans across the country and remade the city whiter and wealthier; recovery dollars, as Robert Bullard and Beverly Wright document, flow along the same racial channels as the original harm. Climate change now generalizes the question — Abrahm Lustgarten's mapping of American climate migration projects tens of millions moving within the country this century — and the unit asks learners to carry its frameworks forward: if vulnerability is built, the coming displacements are being decided now, in zoning maps, buyout formulas, and insurance markets.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Explain why "natural disaster" is a misnomer, using the social production of vulnerability as the organizing framework.
• Conduct the elements of a "social autopsy": map disaster outcomes onto pre-existing patterns of segregation, disinvestment, and isolation.
• Analyze post-disaster recovery as a racialized process, tracking aid, insurance, buyouts, and return across one major case.
• Evaluate how climate-driven displacement is likely to reproduce or rework existing racial geographies, and identify the policy decisions that will determine which.

Keywords

• Social vulnerability
• Disaster capitalism
• Environmental racism
• Climate displacement and managed retreat
• Social autopsy
• Recovery inequity

Open Educational Resources

• Shaw, Al, Abrahm Lustgarten, and Jeremy W. Goldsmith. "New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States." ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, September 2020. Explore the maps.

Interactive data feature · Open access.

The interactive county-level maps from ProPublica's climate-migration investigation: heat, humidity, sea-level rise, crop yield, and wildfire projected across the United States to 2070, paired with Lustgarten's reporting on how migration within the country has already begun. The series helped prompt a federal climate-migration study. Learners use it to locate the places they're from and the places they imagine living — and to notice that the maps say nothing about race until the unit's frameworks are laid over them, which is exactly the exercise.

• "Hurricane Katrina's Impact." The Searchable Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Explore the feature.

Digital museum feature · Open access.

A digital feature from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, presented through its online Searchable Museum, on Hurricane Katrina's impact on Black communities. Combining artifacts, photographs, survivor accounts, and interpretive narrative, the feature frames the 2005 storm not as a discrete weather event but as a disaster shaped by the racial history of New Orleans — where Black residents lived on the lowest-lying land, bore the heaviest losses, and faced the steepest path to return. Because it is museum interpretation rather than breaking-news journalism, it offers learners the long, curated view: the aftermath, the scattering of a community, and the questions of memory and repair the storm left behind. It grounds the unit's central case in the voices and objects of those who lived it, and primes the Katrina case study.

• The Data Center (New Orleans). "Who Lives in New Orleans and Metro Parishes Now?" and Katrina recovery indicators. See the population data.

Regional data resource · Open access.

The independent New Orleans data shop that has tracked the city's population, demographics, and recovery indicators continuously since Katrina — the authoritative answer to "who came back": the city's Black population remains far below pre-storm levels while other groups recovered or grew. Gives the unit's displacement claims their evidentiary base and learners a model of long-horizon civic data work; pairs with the case study's demographic questions.

• Hersher, Rebecca, and Robert Benincasa. "Why FEMA Aid Is Unavailable to Many Who Need It the Most." NPR, 2021. Read the investigation.

Investigative journalism (with audio) · Open access.

NPR's analysis of FEMA assistance data showing that federal disaster aid systematically favors whiter, wealthier households — through title documentation requirements that exclude heirs' property owners, damage formulas that track property value rather than need, and appeals processes that reward resources. The piece converts "recovery inequity" from accusation to documented mechanism, and connects this unit to the property-law material elsewhere in the project, where heirs' property surfaces here as a disaster-aid trap.

Key Scholarship

• Bittle, Jake. The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023. Publisher page.

Book.

Reported across drowned Louisiana parishes, burned California towns, and flooded Houston bayous, Bittle documents climate displacement as already underway — and shows its machinery (insurance withdrawal, buyout formulas, rental-market scrambles after each storm) sorting people by race and wealth at every step. The book gives the unit its forward arc: the coming migration will be governed by the same instruments that governed the last century's racial geography, unless those instruments are redesigned. The unit's most recent anchor.

• Horowitz, Andy. Katrina: A History, 1915–2015. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Publisher page.

Book.

Horowitz's Bancroft-winning argument that Katrina was a century in the making: oil-industry canals that destroyed the wetlands, levee politics that protected some neighborhoods and not others, housing policy that placed Black New Orleanians in the lowest-lying land, and a recovery that completed what the flood began. By starting in 1915 and ending in 2015, the book makes the unit's central methodological point — a disaster is a history, not an event — and supplies the spine of the Katrina case study.

• Woods, Clyde. Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Edited by Jordan T. Camp and Laura Pulido. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. Publisher page.

Book.

Woods — a founding Black geographies scholar, published posthumously — reads post-Katrina New Orleans through two centuries of struggle between "Bourbon" planter-bloc restorations and the working-class Black "blues" tradition of social vision. The recovery, in his account, was a restoration: public housing demolished, public schools converted, public hospital closed — disaster as the occasion for a long-sought remaking. Brings the module's geographic tradition directly into the unit and names what "disaster capitalism" looks like with New Orleans specificity.

• Bullard, Robert D., and Beverly Wright. The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities. New York: NYU Press, 2012. Publisher page.

Book.

The environmental-justice tradition's systematic account of disaster response as racial policy: from toxic siting and "fenceline" exposure through emergency response, cleanup standards, and recovery funding, Bullard (the field's founding figure) and Wright (a New Orleans scholar who lived Katrina's aftermath) document a consistent pattern of government protection calibrated to race. The book carries the unit's environmental-racism thread and its policy ledger — what equitable disaster governance would have to change, agency by agency.

• Klinenberg, Eric. Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015 [2002]. Publisher page.

Book.

The founding "social autopsy": why did the 1995 Chicago heat wave kill over 700 people, and why were the deaths concentrated among isolated, elderly, Black residents of disinvested neighborhoods? Klinenberg autopsies the city rather than the bodies — segregation, abandoned commercial strips, fear of crime, hollowed public services — and demonstrates that comparable neighborhoods with intact social infrastructure had a fraction of the deaths. The unit's methods text, and increasingly its most urgent one as heat becomes the deadliest climate hazard.

Case Studies

• Katrina at Twenty: The Disaster That Is Still Happening

The Smithsonian NMAAHC Katrina feature, New Orleans recovery data, and Horowitz's history · Long-aftermath timeline analysis.

A long-aftermath analysis in which learners reconstruct Hurricane Katrina as a timeline that begins decades before landfall — in canals, levees, and housing siting — and runs twenty years past it, through demolitions, school conversion, and the uneven return of displaced residents, to answer the case's organizing question: when, exactly, was the disaster? A closing comparison of two New Orleans neighborhoods on flood depth, aid flow, and return rates tests the claim that a disaster is a history, not an event.

• Hurricane María and the Politics of Counting the Dead

Puerto Rico, 2017: official and independent mortality estimates and the politics of the count · Data-and-accountability analysis.

A data-and-accountability analysis of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, where an official death toll of 64 stood for nearly a year against independent estimates in the thousands, until commissioned studies forced a revision to roughly 3,000. Learners examine how disaster deaths are counted and contested, why the undercount mattered for aid and accountability, and how Puerto Rico's colonial status shaped both the response and the counting — extending the unit's data-critical method to the Latinx archive.

Questions for Reflection

1. On the framing concept: Take any disaster you remember and rewrite its one-sentence news description without the word "natural" — naming instead the decisions that produced the vulnerability. What changes in where responsibility lands?
2. On Klinenberg: The social autopsy found that neighborhood social infrastructure — stores, libraries, foot traffic, organizations — predicted who survived the heat. Audit a neighborhood you know: what is its social infrastructure, who maintains it, and what has been allowed to decay?
3. On Horowitz: If Katrina began in 1915, today's equivalents are being built now. Identify one current decision — a zoning change, a levee or seawall, an insurance withdrawal, a buyout program — and write its disaster history in advance: who is being made vulnerable, and who protected?
4. On Bullard and Wright and the FEMA investigation: Recovery aid favors documented ownership, higher property values, and appeal resources. Walk through how each requirement, race-neutral on its face, produces racially unequal recovery — and propose one redesigned rule.
5. On Woods: Woods reads the rebuilding of New Orleans as a "restoration" — a long-sought remaking that the flood made possible, in which public housing was demolished, public schools were converted, and the public hospital closed. Take one institution in a place you know that was privatized, closed, or "reformed" in the wake of a crisis. Was the crisis the cause of the change, or the occasion for it? What was gained, what was lost, and by whom?
6. On Bittle and displacement: Climate migration will be governed by instruments — insurance, buyouts, credit, zoning — rather than by anyone deciding who moves. Drawing on the unit, argue whether the coming displacement will reproduce the racial geography of the last century or could be made to break it. What single policy lever matters most to your answer?

Further Readings and Resources

• Lustgarten, Abrahm. On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. Publisher page.

Book.

The full-length book behind the ProPublica investigation above: Lustgarten's account of how a warming climate is beginning to uproot Americans, moving from the projections of the maps to the on-the-ground reality of who is already leaving and why. He traces heat, fire, water, and insurance as the forces reshaping where the country can live, and argues that the coming internal migration will follow, and could deepen, existing lines of wealth and race. A book-length companion for learners who want the argument in full.

• Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Read about the book.

Book.

The source of the term "disaster capitalism." Klein argues that crises — natural disasters, wars, economic collapses — are routinely used as openings to push through unpopular free-market policies while populations are too disoriented to resist, and her chapter on New Orleans reads the post-Katrina demolition of public housing and privatization of public schools as a case in point. It supplies the concept that Woods develops with New Orleans specificity, and a frame for reading recovery as opportunity for some.

• Adams, Vincanne. Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Publisher page.

Book.

An ethnography of the privatized recovery that followed Katrina, in which the work of rebuilding was outsourced to charities, faith groups, and for-profit contractors while residents navigated a maze of aid that often failed them. Adams documents the human cost of a recovery run as a market — the exhaustion, debt, and second-order suffering of people made to be their own case managers. It puts flesh on the disaster-capitalism argument, showing what privatized care feels like from inside.

• Hardy, R. Dean, Richard A. Milligan, and Nik Heynen. "Racial Coastal Formation: The Environmental Injustice of Colorblind Adaptation Planning for Sea-Level Rise." Geoforum 87 (2017): 62–72. Read the article (DOI).

Journal article.

A journal article arguing that planning for sea-level rise, when it proceeds as though race were irrelevant, actively produces racial inequality — deciding which coastal communities are defended and which are left to flood. The authors coin "racial coastal formation" to name how colorblind adaptation reproduces the racial order along the shoreline. It connects the unit to the colorblindness material developed elsewhere in this resource, and sharpens the claim that the next century's disasters are being designed now.

• Lee, Spike, dir. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. HBO, 2006. Watch the documentary.

Documentary film (video).

Spike Lee's four-hour documentary on Hurricane Katrina and its immediate aftermath, told largely through the testimony of New Orleanians who lived it. Structured as four "acts," it moves from the storm and the flooding through the failures of rescue and the early displacement, giving the unit's central case a record in residents' own voices and faces. Long enough to assign in parts, it pairs with Horowitz's history as the lived, first-person counterpart to the archival account.

• Sastry, Narayan, Jesse Gregory, et al. The Displaced New Orleans Residents Survey. RAND Corporation. Explore the study.

Longitudinal research study.

The Displaced New Orleans Residents Survey, a longitudinal study by Narayan Sastry, Jesse Gregory, and colleagues that tracked where residents went after Katrina and who eventually returned. It is the rigorous social-science base beneath the headline finding that the city's Black population did not come back at the same rate as others, and it models how displacement can be measured over time rather than guessed at. A resource for learners who want the data behind the Data Center's summaries.

• First Street Foundation — Risk Factor. Search an address on Risk Factor.

Property-level climate-risk data tool.

First Street Foundation's Risk Factor tool assigns property-level scores for flood, fire, heat, and wind risk, and its data now feeds major real-estate and listing platforms. Learners can search an address and watch climate risk being priced into the housing market in real time — the quiet mechanism at the center of Bittle's argument, in which insurance and risk scores, not any single decision-maker, sort people by who can afford to stay. The underlying research organization is First Street Foundation (firststreet.org).

• New York City Heat Vulnerability Index. NYC Environment & Health Data Portal, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Open the index.

Local interactive data tool.

New York City's Heat Vulnerability Index, published on the city's Environment and Health Data Portal, scores every neighborhood for the risk of dying in extreme heat, combining surface temperature, tree cover, air conditioning access, and social factors. It shows the Bronx among the hottest and most exposed parts of the city, bringing the unit's heat-and-vulnerability theme home to a borough many learners know. A local instrument for the kind of social autopsy Klinenberg models at city scale.

• Rebuild by Design. "Interactive Maps: Identifying Risk and Vulnerability." Browse the hazard maps.

Interactive mapping toolkit.

A toolkit of interactive hazard and vulnerability maps assembled by Rebuild by Design, the initiative born from the federal design competition that followed Hurricane Sandy. It gathers flood, heat, storm-surge, and social-vulnerability maps in one place, letting learners locate the risks facing a given community and compare how different hazards fall across the same population. A practical entry point for the mapping work the unit's frameworks call for.