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Over half the world’s population lives in urban regions, and increasingly disasters are of great concern to city dwellers, policymakers, and builders. However, disaster risk is also of great interest to corporations, financiers, and investors. Risky Cities is a critical examination of global urban development, capitalism, and its relationship with environmental hazards. It is about how cities live and profit from the threat of sinkholes, garbage, and fire. Risky Cities is not simply about post-catastrophe profiteering. This book focuses on the way in which disaster capitalism has figured out ways to commodify environmental bads and manage risks. Notably, capitalist city-building results in the physical transformation of nature. This necessitates risk management strategies –such as insurance, environmental assessments, and technocratic mitigation plans. As such capitalists redistribute risk relying on short-term fixes to disaster risk rather than address long-term vulnerabilities. 

Over half the world's population lives in urban regions, and increasingly disasters are of great concern to city dwellers, policymakers, and builders. However, disaster risk is also of great interest to corporations, financiers, and investors. Risky Cities is a critical examination of global urban development, capitalism, and its relationship with environmental hazards. It is about how cities live and profit from the threat of sinkholes, garbage, and fire. Risky Cities is not simply about post-catastrophe profiteering. This book focuses on the way in which disaster capitalism has figured out ways to commodify environmental bads and manage risks. Notably, capitalist city-building results in the physical transformation of nature. This necessitates risk management strategies -such as insurance, environmental assessments, and technocratic mitigation plans. As such capitalists redistribute risk relying on short-term fixes to disaster risk rather than address long-term vulnerabilities.

Incineration, or waste-to-energy, is a widespread means of greenwashing municipal solid waste collection worldwide. This paper looks at incineration and the trade of bottom ash to discuss how urbanization in one country pressures urban expansion elsewhere in the modern world-system. Incineration is a coping mechanism for excess waste produced by cities under capitalism. It generates energy, reduces the volume of waste, and creates ash that can be used in cement production. However, it is far from sustainable, as it facilitates expansion-oriented growth. Using UN Comtrade data, we find that incineration is a material and metabolic process that promotes global urbanization in the following ways: 1.) Corporations producing and selling incineration are part of a transnational growth machine that fuels the treadmill of production. 2.) North-North, North-South, and South-South relationships encourage incineration as a means of ecological modernization. 3.) These relationships have both hierarchical and polycentric dimensions—allowing us to create a typology for understanding such processes within the modern world-system.

This article presents information about the planning, implementation, and findings of an assessment-based student portfolio designed by the faculty of a sociology program at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, a midsized public regional liberal arts institution. First, we briefly present the rationale for implementing a portfolio system and the thought process by which our particular portfolio assessment tool was created. Then, we explain our findings using the portfolio assessment system and how these findings were used to modify and strengthen the program as well as serve as a basis for long-term planning for the program.

Sinkholes are phenomena that seem to appear out of nowhere to create visually arresting disasters. At times, they cause devastation, not unlike a cinematic version of an earthquake, as the ground opens to devour homes, cars, and people. In 2013, a massive sinkhole consumed a resort near Walt Disney World in Florida, and in Guangzhou, China, a sinkhole swallowed up buildings and disrupted power to the neighborhood. In 2014, a sinkhole opened under the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky, dragging several cars into it. In 2015, sinkholes swallowed cars and homes in London leading to evacuations. The list of buildings,

This chapter examines the social, economic, and political relationship between urban development and fire. Wildfires (also referred to as bushfires) are increasing around the world because of climate change and urban growth. Wildfires in the past were largely local or regional events. Yet global climate change and human activities have made them a global problem. In turn, Andrew Scott describes our planet as literally burning. He and others note that wildfire is not just a natural disaster: It is a human and urban catastrophe that is happening on a larger and larger scale.¹ This has profound consequences for our understanding

While disaster risk has the attention of policymakers, we see that that disaster alone is not enough for them to abandon expansion-oriented urbanization. By 2050, the world’s urban population will be about double what it is now. This means that two-thirds of the world’s people will be living in urban areas. An estimated 90 percent of this growth will occur in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Notably, global megacities will increase their populations and expand their social, political, and economic reach. Not only do we see this contributing to climate change, but it is placing people into increasingly

Previous chapters have considered how risk is linked to the fiscal decisions of policymakers and corporations as well as the physical construction of the built environment. Certainly, there have been attempts to adapt and to mitigate disaster within the framework of capitalism. However, we must be careful in simply designating this all as greenwashing. Corporations often misrepresent the sustainability of their products. While greenwashing does overlap with the deployment of disaster management plans, it is essential to examine the real practices of financial actors that co-opt adaptation, mitigation, resilience, and sustainability projects. We see that decisionmaking is heavily influenced by

Currently, most of the world’s population lives in cities. At the same time, we have seen calamities such as earthquakes, floods, sinkholes, tropical storms, and other catastrophes wreak havoc in urban regions.¹ The existence of these threats means that billions of people live under the threat of natural and environmental disasters (see figure 1.1). This chapter offers a theoretical framework for understanding this precarity by looking at how natural hazards, the built environment, and capitalism contribute to the emergence of risky cities in our contemporary world. This framework, in turn, helps us analyze how environmental bads that threaten cities can

You might be wondering how garbage fits into a study of urban disaster. The handling of municipal solid waste is critical to the functioning of cities. Urban areas—because of their population density—are persistently at risk of an environmental crisis because of waste. In early 2018, the European Union threatened to sanction Italy for the waste crisis in Rome. Italy had already been sanctioned in 2010 by the European Court of Justice for trash problems. At the time, it argued that Italy had not sufficiently implemented EU laws on waste to the point of creating health hazards.¹ For decades,