Climate, Infrastructure, and Emergency Powers Workshop

On Friday, April 13, 2018 the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture hosted a workshop on "Climate, Infrastructure, and Emergency Powers" as a part of its "Power: Infrastructure in America" research initiative. While recognizing the necessity for emergency preparedness under constitutional democracy, one can nonetheless acknowledge that infrastructural crises associated with climate-related events have increasingly become the basis for the suspension or undermining of democratic institutions and the dramatic reshaping of environments, as in the case of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, and possibly Houston after Hurricane Harvey, among others. Invited workshop guests discussed this and related ecological, spatial, and political issues across disciplines, as well as intellectual and institutional strategies for studying these processes and drawing greater public attention to their implications. 

Participants included Fallon Samuels Aidoo (University of New Orleans), Daniel A. Barber (University of Pennsylvania), David Bond (Bennington College), Ashley Dawson (Princeton Environmental Institute), Anthony Fontenot (Woodbury University), Andy Horowitz (Tulane University), Andrea Muehlebach (University of Toronto), Cassandra Shepard (Northwestern University), Albert Pope (Rice University), and Abby Spinak (Harvard University).