Infrastructural events? Flood disaster, narratives and framing under hazardous urbanisation

'The river was moved too close to my house!' declared a soon-to-be-displaced resident following flood disaster in Brazil. Infrastructural engineering decades earlier had changed the river's course and led to the flooding of his home, yet the state now blamed a rainstorm for causing the disaster. The narrative of a natural event provided the pretext for urban governance based around evictions and further rounds of infrastructural engineering, nominally aimed at pre-empting a dangerous climate future. The paper takes the circumstances of this case to trigger a conceptual discussion on governance of the disaster event, narratives, and the promise of infrastructures to mitigate alarming urban futures. I draw on urban political ecology, the sociology of the event, and recent social studies of infrastructure, while also questioning understandings of eventful nature in the post-human turn. Tackling urban disaster risk, it is argued, depends on a political reframing of disasters as infrastructural events. This is a reflexive process that challenges how risks are produced through capitalist urbanisation, with the aim of making this longer temporality eventful for social change. A focus on politicised infrastructures reveals and disrupts dominant natural hazard narratives that remain integral to hazardous urban expansion.

Automated summary

This paper uses the case of the Brazil flood disaster to discuss the governance of disaster events, narratives, and the potential of infrastructures in mitigating urban futures. The author argues that addressing urban disaster risk requires reframing disasters as infrastructural events and challenging dominant natural hazard narratives.