Rebuilding the Future: Disaster Anticipation and Recovery Planning in Vancouver, Canada
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Jonathan Eaton
PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia Canada
eatonj@student.ubc.ca
Author(s):
In November 2019, my partner and I attended a lively workshop on art and earthquake resilience in Vancouver, Canada. We were there, alongside artists, organizers, and concerned residents, because all of us knew, at some level, that Vancouver could face ‘The Big One’ at any moment. Using hot-glue and found objects, organizers asked us to imagine a postearthquake future, materialising our vision as a commentary on how society would or could respond to a seismic disaster. Participants worked alone or in groups to produce small sculptures: a community garden of bottlecaps lined with bits of driftwood; a futuristic house with tin-can walls and cardboard solar panels; or a lighthouse of sticks and wire mesh that would serve as a beacon to bring people together. Though the aesthetics resembled the dystopic world of Mad Max, the stories of these sculptures told of an aftermath where society practiced sustainable living, neighbourliness, and mutual aid. Kirsten Hastrup asserts that “the most valuable general insight produced by anthropologists studying the effects of climate change on particular societies is that people never see themselves as without some kind of future, somewhere”(2016, 51). What that future looks like can vary drastically from person to person. In this ethnographic project, I ask, how do people draw on their values to imagine a post-disaster future for their neighbourhood, and what implications do those imagined futures have for disaster recovery planning?
Large earthquakes are simultaneously knowable and unknowable in the Pacific Northwest. While Indigenous oral histories and geological analyses confirm that earthquakes have shaped life and landscapes across the region for millennia, at the same time, no one alive today has experienced a destructive earthquake in Vancouver and its environs. Given the unpredictability of major earthquakes, plans for reducing seismic vulnerabilities must vie for political capital alongside the many present crises facing the city, which are also entangled with contested histories and contemporary urban imaginaries. By placing a pre-disaster society in the temporal space of long-term post-disaster recovery, I draw out lessons for recovery planning in an unpredictable present.
Works Cited
Hastrup, Kirsten. 2016. “Climate Knowledge: Assemblage, Anticipation, Action.” In Anthropology and Climate Change: From Actions to Transformations, edited by Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall, 35–57. New York: Routledge.
Preparing for future crises: Temporal possibilities and their materialisations