Pushpa Arabindoo’s brilliant paper on the 2015 Chennai floods has just been published.
“Recognising the need for a more robust (post-) disaster discussion, this paper offers an anatomy of the floods that begs a broader rethink of 21st-century urban disasters and argues that the current discourse offered by the social science of disaster is insufficient in unravelling the complex spatial and environmental histories behind disasters. It goes beyond setting up a mere critique of capitalist urbanisation to offer a cogent debunking of the deeply engrained assumptions about the unprecedented nature of disasters” (Arabindoo 2017).
The paper Unprecedented Natures is published in City journal: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1239410.
In October 2016, Pushpa presented this work to MArch students in DS18 at the University of Westminster working on Chennai as part of the Monsoon Assemblages project. Below is her power point presentation.
[slideshare id=71315892&doc=arabindoounprecedentednatures-170124054831]
Pushpa Arabindoo is an urbanist and a geographer based in the Department of Geography, University College London and a member of the MONASS Advisory Board. Go here for her profile.