Patterns of disaster commemoration in long‐term recovery

The postdisaster landscape is replete with memorials that help communities collectively remember destructive events and recover psychologically. Although commemoration is intrinsic to all stages of recovery, little research from the disaster‐science field engages memorial texts across disasters. Meanwhile, a rich body of work on memorials and their functions exists in the cultural geographic tradition. Drawing from this literature, the current study examines a sample of U.S.‐based memorials to discern patterns within the postdisaster commemorative landscape. This research leverages discourse analysis to interrogate the meanings and mechanics of postdisaster memory work. Findings revealing that disasters catalyze remembrances that remake places, postdisaster memorial texts construct wide‐ranging degrees of intimacy, and memorials distilling survivor memories impel community recovery differently than memorials that reconstruct imagined pasts. These identified patterns in postdisaster commemoration enable further systematic exploration of memory work in the long‐term recovery process.     

Residential perspectives: the value of Floodplain‐ buyout open space

This mixed‐methods case study identifies how floodplain property acquisition—a buyout—impacts an urban environment at the neighborhood scale while considering the role of individual residents in formal and informal land‐use decision making. In floodplain buyouts, the reopening of urban space is enabled by federal structural drivers, primarily Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), but it is repurposed as a cultural landscape constructed and produced by individuals. This research explores how residents perceive and ascribe values to the buyout landscape in Lexington, Kentucky. Enabled by federal funds, but left largely to their own devices, residents in Lexington adopted uses, ascribed values, and produced their own land‐use norms in each buyout neighborhood.     

Resilient Landscapes: The Reconstruction of Southeastern Connecticut Following the 1938 Hurricane

Following the 1938 hurricane that damaged much of the New England coast, New London, Connecticut, responded like most communities by leveraging federal and state funds to rebuild and augment engineered mitigation structures. Eighty years of subsequent storm experience, however, illustrates that a small number of nonstructural mitigation projects, especially private property acquisitions, have had significant long-term effects on New London's coastal resiliency, especially in the Ocean Beach neighborhood. Archival research identifies that these nonstructural mitigation projects were not initially intended to reduce hurricane or flooding risk but were aimed at removing structures determined to be public nuisances and reducing fire hazard. Therefore, New London's post-1938 mitigation experience underscores how community-scale mitigation planning following one disaster can greatly affect the outcome of future disasters. Analytically, New London's experience offers a compelling case study to critically compare two competing environmental mitigation approaches following the same disaster and to offer insight into the environmental legacies of both.