The struggle for a just recovery: Insurgent planning, transnational networks, and colonial legacies in post-disaster Puerto Rico

This dissertation uses the notion of invited and invented spaces of action in order to explore the plural ways in which communities engage with planning for post-disaster recovery. More fundamentally still, this dissertation examines how planning practices and meanings are mobilized to advance alternative recovery agendas for underserved and marginalized communities in post-disaster, colonial contexts. The study provides a three-dimensional (3D) view of the spaces of action that allow citizens to gain meaningful opportunities to collectively engage with their recovery. Also, it sheds light on the barriers and constraints in spaces that do not. The study is based on the case of Puerto Rico after Hurricanes Irma and María struck in September of 2017. In contexts like Puerto Rico, with low government capacity and with a wide range of communities that have been historically underserved and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality, traditional planning frameworks present limited versions of the realities that take place during disaster recovery. In fact, there is little detailed knowledge about the bottom-up, community-based planning practices and meanings used to advance socially transformative recovery agendas. This work adopts a broad conceptualization of planning theory and practice to shed light on often occluded community recovery dynamics, mainly those that evolve outside or at the margins of the purview of the state, but also those that interact in both complementary and conflicting ways, many of which have not been analyzed in planning literature. Chapter two examines the dynamic, interactive relationships between grassroots movements and the communities they serve from an insurgent planning perspective. I present three cases of grassroots movements and articulate the notion of bomba planning as an analytic device to capture their distinctive features as they pursue self-determination and a just recovery. Chapter three focuses on transnational collective action from the standpoint of Chicago’s Puerto Rican diaspora and the transnational roles they played for post-disaster recovery. This chapter explains how Chicago’s Puerto Rican diaspora provided resource lifelines to Puerto Ricans in the archipelago and to those that migrated to Chicago. Using the analytic lens of transnationalism “from below,” I discuss the resources that they mobilized, the types of challenges that they faced, and the key features and characteristics of their efforts. Finally, Chapter 4 sheds light on how the invited spaces of participation in post-disaster recovery planning shape the extent to which local planners advance citizen participation and equitable engagement. The chapter provides an example of how good intentions, when not paired with careful, smart design, can end exacerbating preexisting conditions of injustice. The chapter also provides some recommendations for professional planners at different levels of government.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Regional Planning

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Torres-Cordero, Ariam L.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Pendall, Rolf
• Miraftab, Faranak
• Lamba-Nieves, Deepak
• Olshansky, Robert B

• insurgent planning
• transnationalism
• disaster recovery
• disaster policy
• colonialism
• Puerto Rico

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Ariam Torres-Cordero

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117705

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F117705