Resilience as organicist metaphor in OneNYC : the plan for a strong and just city.

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2017-04-27

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This thesis analyzes the discursive and material effects of resilience as organicist metaphor in One New York: The Plan for a Strong and Just City (OneNYC). The resilience metaphor’s form and function is inherently conservative, constraining the vision of an ecologically just NYC within broader discourses of growth-dependent urban planning, the reversal of white flight, and intensification of environmental racism. By figuring social equity as a product of economic and environmental resilience strategies, the rhetorical form of de Blasio’s speech and OneNYC plan centralizes neoliberal market logic of development as a natural, organic mode of perceiving and engaging the city. Despite intentions of planners and the de Blasio administration, the naturalization of such market logics materially functions to displace responsibility for disaster relief onto affected communities. At the same time, it incentivizes speculative investing that makes green washing and displacement of New York City’s most vulnerable communities inevitable.

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