Downscaling Resilience from Los Angeles to Watts: Contestations, Appropriations, and Opportunities

Faced with current and future climate risks, cities are increasingly adopting resilience plans. These comprehensive plans reference a systems-wide approach to planning. Resilience plans are typically conceived of and generated at the municipal level, making an examination of the ways in which they scale down when applied to the diverse and situated experiences of specific neighborhoods within the city critical. The urban can be understood as a system, or set of relations, that transcends individual neighborhoods. The urban is also constituted by a number of discrete and diverse communities that challenge a singular understanding of climate justice. Indeed, climate justice recognizes existing, historic, and systemic inequalities in order to avoid exacerbating climate risks in vulnerable communities. Building on this framework, I focus on how one community takes on, challenges, and appropriates the principles and strategies outlined in its city’s resilience plan and argue for resilience planning that is situated and embedded. Through research on the Watts community of South Los Angeles, I examine how resilience planning strategies, frameworks, and goals are adopted, implemented, and contested at the finer scale of the neighborhood and discuss the implications of this study for climate justice.

Downscaling Resilience from Los Angeles to Watts: Contestations, Appropriations, and Opportunities