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Environmental Politics
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New York City as ‘fortress of solitude’ after
Hurricane Sandy: a relational sociology of extreme
weather’s relationship to climate politics
Daniel Aldana Cohen
To cite this article: Daniel Aldana Cohen (2020): New York City as ‘fortress of solitude’ after
Hurricane Sandy: a relational sociology of extreme weather’s relationship to climate politics,
Environmental Politics, DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2020.1816380
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2020.1816380
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Published online: 13 Sep 2020.
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New York City as ‘fortress of solitude’ after Hurricane
Sandy: a relational sociology of extreme weather’s
relationship to climate politics
Daniel Aldana Cohen
Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
ABSTRACT
How did New York City’s climate politics change after Hurricane Sandy, and
why? Prevailing accounts of extreme weather’s impact on climate politics draw
on survey data and characterize climate policy in vague terms. However,
weather does not do the work of politics; the specics of climate policy matter.
I develop a relational sociological approach focused on mobilized actors, poli-
tical economy, and event theory. Drawing on interviews and document analysis,
I show how senior disaster ocials, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg and his Oce
of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, community groups and Occupy
Sandy activists responded to Hurricane Sandy. Actors maintained outlooks
and practices consistent with their position in the city’s power relations. This
selective continuity shifted New York’s climate policy from decarbonization-
focused tentative cosmopolitanism to adaptation-focused defensive parochial-
ism. I term this convergent prioritization of adaptation a ‘fortress of solitude’
social logic. Only subsequent events explain New York’s 2019 low-carbon
legislation.
KEYWORDS Extreme weather; climate politics; relational sociology; disaster; New York City; urban
planning
Introduction
In late October 2012, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the liberal, prosperous, and
aspiring sustainability beacon, New York City. Bloomberg Businessweek
crystallized the mainstream media coverage with its cover story, ‘It’s Global
Warming, Stupid,’ declaring: ‘The only responsible first step is to put climate
change back on the table for discussion’ (Barrett 2012). Former Vice-
President Al Gore compared Sandy to a ‘nature hike through the Book of
Revelation;’ he added that, ‘People are now connecting the dots’ (Kim 2013),
echoing a widespread view among climate campaigners that extreme weather
events were ‘teachable moments’ about humans’ responsibility for global
warming, thus prompting low-carbon policymaking (Weber 2006,
CONTACT Daniel Aldana Cohen [email protected]
Supplemental data for this paper can be accessed on the publisher’s website.
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS
https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2020.1816380
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Leiserowitz et al. 2013). This perspective is if anything more prominent
today. In The New York Times, political scientist Leah Stokes (2018) has
urged greater public communication of attribution science, which quantifies
how much anthropogenic climate change worsens a given disaster (eg,
Diffenbaugh et al. 2017). In early 2019, the New York Times reported, ‘As
battle lines harden between supporters and opponents of climate action, both
are increasingly using bouts of extreme weather as a weapon to try to win
people to their side’ (Plumer 2019).
Should we accept the assumption that recognizing climate disasters as
human-caused will automatically lead to particular climate policies?
Furthermore, should we accept the linked, common idea that disaster-
stricken cities in particular are ideal low-carbon leaders (Angelo and
Wachsmuth 2019)? New York’s climate politics are a famous reference
point; it is imperative to clarify what happened and why. What kind of
climate policy action was prioritized in New York after Sandy? Which factors
steered the specifics of how climate concern was guided into particular policy
responses? What if local political actors’ responses to the very phenomenon
expected to deepen and broaden the effort to slash greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions had the opposite result? New York’s politics are unique, but the
real estate-driven ‘growth machine’ that dominates its economy – and shapes
its politics – is common worldwide.
New York’s climate politics certainly gained prominence after Hurricane
Sandy (Rosenzweig and Solecki 2014). In April 2019, the city passed the
country’s most aggressive low-carbon buildings bill (DiChristopher 2019).
As I show below, however, the battle to pass that bill did not begin in Sandy’s
aftermath, but nearly two years later, spurred by distinct events. Moreover,
other similarly destructive hurricanes, like the 2017 Hurricanes Harvey
(Houston), Irma (South Florida), and Maria (Puerto Rico) had mixed climate
policy results. A review of Houston’s post-disaster, adaptation-focused cli-
mate policy never mentions GHG emissions (McCormick 2018).
I ask three empirical questions to crack open the black box of post-
disaster climate politics. How did senior disaster responders interpret
Sandy’s climate policy implications? How did Mayor Bloomberg’s and his
Office of Long-Term Planning and Responsibility’s climate policy priorities
change in the wake of the storm? Finally, how did community groups and
activists respond as they addressed social inequities in the recovery and
rebuilding process?
I also develop a relational sociological approach to extreme weather’s
impact on climate politics, focusing on eventfulness and inequality. This
contrasts with prevailing research on climate disasters’ political impact,
which is largely grounded in public opinion surveys, often assuming that
weather plays an independent political role. A case study of one city cannot
be generalized, but it can reveal causal mechanisms and pathways linked to
2 D. A. COHEN
dynamics common to other cities (George and Bennett 2005). Further
research along these lines would enable multi-city analyses.
My study mainly examines the 14 months of Sandy’s immediate after-
math, while Michael Bloomberg remained Mayor, enabling a tight focus on
post-disaster politics and the political framework of Bloomberg’s mayoralty.
I also summarize a subsequent shift in the city’s climate politics, a return to
low-carbon policy-making. I show that these were not on the public radar
post-Sandy, but gained prominence after later events.
I examine local actors, leaving aside the federal government. Nevertheless,
federal actions in Sandy’s aftermath ran parallel to New York City’s. Its
principal intervention in the region was the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding
Task Force, led by the United States Department of Housing and Urban
Development, and launched on 7 December 2012. This Task Force created
the Rebuild by Design competition, which focused on ‘resiliency’ – a term that
typically means adaptation; its meaning sometimes includes decarbonization,
but the projects arising from this post-Sandy process mainly involved adapta-
tion. The State of New York likewise focused in Sandy’s aftermath on resiliency.
Overall, I find that New York City’s key local political actors reacted to the
storm by shifting the city’s climate politics from a tentative cosmopolitanism
emphasizing decarbonization to a defensive parochialism emphasizing adap-
tation. I document how, for senior disaster responders and policymakers,
direct contact with extreme weather translated into the prioritization of
adaptation; how the Mayor and his sustainability office shifted emphasis to
localized adaptation; and how community groups and activists mostly
accepted (but sometimes contested) these top-down framings to focus on
social inequities. I use the term ‘fortress of solitude’ to name the emergent
social logic underpinning the city’s post-Sandy defensive parochialism,
where adaptation took priority over decarbonization, and climate politics’
responsibility to future New Yorkers came before responsibilities to the global
community.
1
Extreme weather events will increase in frequency and severity. We need to
better understand how mobilized political actors respond. If urban climate
politics can tilt toward defensive parochialism in New York under a globe-
trotting mayor known for climate leadership, the same can happen anywhere.
The next section explains my relational sociological approach and con-
textualizes New York’s 21
st
century climate politics. Next, I outline my data
and methods. I then answer my three empirical questions, and theorize the
post-Sandy ‘fortress of solitude’ social logic and the prospects for escaping it.
A relational sociology approach
The existing literature on extreme weather and climate politics, grounded in
survey research, needs the insights of relational sociology. Surveys find at best
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 3
only moderate evidence that extreme weather prompts greater belief in anthro-
pogenic global warming, and at best mildly increased support for vaguely
defined climate policy. Attitudes are intensely mediated by pre-existing political
commitments (Brulle et al. 2012, Howe and Leiserowitz 2013, Hamilton et al.
2015, Egan and Mullin 2017, Sisco et al. 2017, Bergquist and Warshaw 2019).
These trends are exemplified by opinion research following Hurricane Sandy,
which found no significant impact on attitudes to global warming (Quinnipiac
University 2012, Siena Research Institute 2012). After Sandy, while New Jersey
residents told pollsters they supported climate action, they registered little
support for contributing to it financially (Greenberg et al. 2014).
Norgaard’s (2011) ethnographic study of climate complacency in
a Norwegian ski town, where a warm winter ravaged the economy, suggests
a more subtle and multi-sided approach. Brulle and Norgaard (2019) have
further elaborated this theoretical model in terms of social trauma. Their argu-
ments speak to climate inaction, however, not the specificities of climate policy
reaction.
Overall, Brulle et al. (2012) persuasively argue that mobilized political
projects are what decisively shape people’s climate politics. Extreme weather
cannot do the work of politics.
To deepen our understanding of political change after disasters, I turn to
relational sociology, building on the insights of disaster and urban sociology.
I interrogate how extreme weather events transform policy projects, which
I understand as a mix of prevailing orientations and practices. ‘Relational
sociology’ crystallizes several longstanding intellectual traditions that focus
on uneven processes and bundles of social relations (Emirbayer 1997).
Desmond (2014, p. 554) summarizes relational approaches as ‘giv[ing] onto-
logical primacy, not to groups or places, but to configurations of relations (my
emphasis),’ such that relational fieldwork ‘focus[es] on dynamics that emerge
between groups or agencies qualitatively different from, yet oriented toward
and enmeshed with, one another.’
Sociologists with relational dispositions have argued that, during events,
stable political situations are transformed by agents re-coding newly unstable
structures, expectations, and norms – a process that is inherently self-
reflective, norm-laden, and experimental (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992,
Baiocchi 2005, Sewell 2005, Calhoun 2012, Itzigsohn and Brown 2020). For
Sewell (2005, p. 219),
the fundamental mechanism of structural change [is] the necessary but risky
application of existing cultural categories to novel circumstances . . . that
transforms the meanings of the cultural markers and thereby reorients the
possibilities of human social action.
Sewell continues that ‘the “conjunctures” we call events are characterized by
emergent regularities or logics; in this they are “structured” in spite of their
4 D. A. COHEN
novelty’ (Ibid, p. 221). In other words, structural change involves selective
continuity. The key issue is which outlooks and practices (my usage) are
preserved, in what form, and how these cluster into an emergent logic, like
the ‘fortress of solitude’ I describe below. Sewell’s event theory directs
attention to how political actors adjust outlooks and practices, and thus the
substance of their political projects.
My relational sociology framework complements theories of ‘focusing
events’ in political science and policy scholarship (Repetto 2006,
Baumgartner et al. 2014), which demonstrate how unusual events – like
weather disasters – enable sharp policy changes as politicians respond to
disruption with new policies. I share one of the literature’s substantive
findings: American post-disaster policy has focused narrowly on reconstruc-
tion, while broader ‘mitigation . . . has taken a back seat’ (Birkland 2006,
p. 103). Much of the classic ‘focusing events’ research concerns formal
political institutions, from the U.S. Congress to national news media.
I contribute a complementary approach that emphasizes local political econ-
omy, community dynamics, and social movements.
Urban and disaster sociologists find that, after crises, elites pursue new
strategies to preserve prior power arrangements, prioritizing a ‘growth
machine’ form of urban governance that puts short-term recovery and
(unequal) economic development before long-term ecological concerns
(Logan and Molotch 2007, Freudenburg et al. 2009, Gotham and
Greenberg 2014, Graham et al. 2016). Meanwhile, low-income and racialized
city residents are disproportionately exposed to ecological crises and their
aftermaths; (re)building poor communities’ social infrastructure is the prior-
ity for grassroots groups (Klinenberg 2002, Superstorm Research Lab 2013).
My approach should expand the focusing events paradigm’s understanding
of which kind of policies arise after a particular disaster.
Finally, cities’ climate politics have a global context, including their
governments’ self-positioning – in New York’s case, as a global leader.
Following London, New York was the second global city to champion low-
carbon policies. Its landmark PlaNYC report promised that New York would
lead the world in slashing carbon emissions: New York could not ‘afford to
wait while others take the lead,’ but needed to ‘rise to the definitive challenge
of the 21st century (City of New York 2007, p. 9). PlaNYC trumpeted
New York’s already energy-efficient density. Leadership meant doing even
better: assisting other large cities in the C40 Cities network, a global climate
policy organization, to adopt and assess policies with a data-driven approach
(Acuto 2013). PlaNYC’s adaptation measures were less ambitious.
PlaNYC’s low-carbon emphasis conformed with global climate politics’
notion of common but differentiated responsibilities, satisfying sociologist
Ulrich Beck’s (2006, p. 7) first principle of cosmopolitanism: ‘the awareness
of interdependence and the resulting “civilizational community of fate”
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 5
induced by global risks and crises, which overcomes the boundaries
between . . . us and them.’ What made Bloomberg’s climate policies global
and cosmopolitan was their emphasis on decarbonizing for the sake of
everyone on the planet, while helping other large cities to likewise cut
GHG emissions.
2
Data and methods
I analyse several data sources. Researchers in the Superstorm Research Lab
(2013), of which I am a founding co-principal investigator, interviewed 75
New Yorkers, grouped in four categories: (a) 18 senior government actors at
the municipal and state level, including consultants, active in response and
rebuilding; (b) 10 senior officials in civil society groups active in disaster
response; (c) 37 volunteer responders, predominantly associated with
Occupy Sandy; and, (d) 17 people directly affected by the storm. Some
respondents belonged in multiple categories. Because of government offi-
cials’ sensitive position, we include no information that would suggest their
identity. Our interview protocol varied by respondent category; we coded
transcripts with the online, collaborative software Dedoose. We supplemen-
ted interview data with ethnographic observation of meetings and events.
I also analyse media, scholarly, and policy documents to assess changes in
the climate policymaking of the Bloomberg regime, especially the key policy
documents released by the Mayor’s Offices of Long-Term Planning and
Sustainability, and Recovery and Resiliency (City of New York 2007,
2013a, 2013b). I lean on seven more recent interviews with civil society
actors to summarize the mid-2010s shift to a low-carbon buildings
campaign.
Results
Improving the city’s disaster response
First, I ask whether Hurricane Sandy transformed attitudes about how to
respond to climate change among senior New York City and New York State
officials and consultants. In Sandy’s aftermath, climate scientist James
Hansen wrote in The Guardian that Sandy was ‘a stark illustration of the
power that climate change can deliver – today – to our doorsteps.’ He
continued:
Ask the local governments struggling weeks later to turn on power to their cold,
darkened towns and cities. Ask the entire north-east coast . . . (Hansen 2012).
It was plainly time, he added, to address root causes: ‘The answer is a price on
carbon’ (Ibid.)
6 D. A. COHEN
Hansen’s argument exemplified the widespread view that direct contact
with extreme weather would clarify the urgency of climate politics, strength-
ening low-carbon policies. However, what if those actors in closest contact
with Sandy’s devastation had a different reaction?
Leading disaster responders did not react as Hansen predicted. Nearly all
18 senior officials or consultants working in official disaster response that we
spoke to viewed Sandy as resulting from, or exemplifying, anthropogenic
climate change. While most felt strongly that it was necessary to defend
against future storms, fewer spoke of GHG emissions. Only six of 18 respon-
dents stated that New York City should work hard to reduce emissions going
forward; of those, just one expressed confidence that it would.
The analytic upshot of semi-structured interviews comes less from count-
ing responses than exploring actors’ complex attitudes – in this case, how they
worked to maximize continuities of outlook and practice. For those who
accepted the new adaptation focus, it followed directly from experiencing
Sandy. These officials saw investing in adaptation efforts as a far-sighted vision
that was difficult to pursue in light of city residents’ short-term troubles. One
respondent said, ‘When it comes to the money that we are getting . . . [it is] to
make it actually, to help the city essentially adapt and be smarter about this the
next time it happens.’ After all, the respondent continued, ‘when it comes to
a hurricane . . . it’s not again about sort of climate change with capital C, it’s
like, how do I make sure my ass doesn’t get flooded at like the next hurricane . .
. Those are two very different conversations.’ This respondent also brushed
decarbonization aside, saying, ‘We’re a green city by default, not through any
efforts of our own . . . tall buildings and all that crap.’
Another respondent expressed similar views, but this time clarified their
role as emergency manager:
[H]ave we begun to see weather have impact and effects which have not
happened in the last 50 to 100 years? Absolutely. [. . .] So is there such a thing
as climate change? There probably is. Do I know the impact that it has on my
city? Yes, I see it physically. But what does it mean to me as an emergency
manager? I’m from the old school. And so until someone can tell me that this
thing climate is actually – it’s real and how do I incorporate that into my plans
I don’t look at it that way. My job is to deal with the facts that are in front of me
and prepare for whatever emergency that’s going to hit the city.
Had this respondent answered an opinion poll, the resulting data point
would have missed every interesting aspect of their thinking.
One senior official said, ‘Larger questions about cause and climate science,
that’s for somebody else to worry about. We’re worried about what climate
science says is going to happen to our system and how we can protect it.’
A further senior official argued that the concept of resiliency was bridging
adaptation and decarbonization in promising ways, but only gave examples
of adaptation policies.
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 7
The most optimistic official, already experienced with clean energy policy,
framed the adaptation-decarbonization overlap with tentative optimism:
‘Specifically, like, we’re at least considering – I’m not sure where we’re
going to come out on it – but we’re at least considering the role that solar,
you know, might play.’
Overall, I found little evidence for Hansen’s expectation that disaster
officials confronting a climate disaster would disrupt institutional logics in
favor of decarbonization. Rather, the interviews suggested that disaster
reinforced longstanding logics of fortification, to free up psychological
and operational space to focus on recovery work with a view to even
worse disasters later on. An exchange with a senior disaster management
consultant, who was also a volunteer disaster respondent, exemplified this
practical, selective continuity:
Superstorm Research Lab: So how much does the discussion of climate
change filter into the kind of work that you are doing?
Respondent: None.
Superstorm Research Lab: None.
Respondent: Sorry.
Superstorm Research Lab: No, that’s fine.
Respondent: Yeah. It’s like sitting around a station as a paramedic asking
people about French fries and smoking. I don’t smoke but, you know, the fact
that I hang out with some paramedics in this world who smoke, I just – really?
Cool. I’ll be doing this on you later, man. So no. The things that annoy me – you
know, I can’t fix climate. But I can get you to manage your paperwork better.
I can get you to plan better. I can get you to follow your plans.
For those intimately involved in recovery, as these 18 respondents were, the
big-picture version of disaster relief was not attacking climate change’s root
causes; rather, it was improving the city’s defences against the next storm.
Pace Hansen, direct experience of extreme weather can restrict the climate
policy outlook. Political leadership from those not mired in disaster response
would likely be necessary to move from mere fortification to a blend of
adaptation and decarbonization.
Indeed, one might expect that political actors with a long-term sus-
tainability focus, and the outlooks and practices of low-carbon policy-
making, would more naturally channel some of the energies of disaster
response into attacking root causes – carbon. In New York’s case, this
would be Mayor Bloomberg and his administration’s agency tasked with
sustainability, the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and
Responsibility.
8 D. A. COHEN
From tentative cosmopolitanism to defensive parochialism
Since 2007, Bloomberg and the Office of Long-Term Planning and
Sustainability had advocated reducing GHG emissions. How did they
respond to the storm? How did their response compare to earlier climate
policymaking? Lacking interview data with the key players, I rely on public
documents.
Bloomberg’s tentative climate cosmopolitanism was anchored in the
city’s 2007 PlaNYC sustainability plan, which blended a powerful sustain-
ability vision with a ‘luxury city’ economic strategy to attract investment
and high-skilled, professional workers (Brash 2011, Checker 2011,
Greenberg 2015). PlaNYC argued that pro-density planning could combine
economic growth, real estate development and GHG reductions (Bagley
and Gallucci 2013).
On PlaNYC’s release, Bloomberg sought state approval for a congestion
charge for Manhattan’s business districts, with the revenues going to public
transit (Schaller 2010). The city’s financial industry was a leading suppor-
ter. This was Bloomberg’s most high-profile climate policy fight, and he
framed it in egalitarian terms – global leadership based on a local win-win-
win for slashing emissions, cutting business-stymying congestion, and
improving air quality. But Bloomberg failed to secure support from the
state legislative assembly, as most of the city’s residents and politicians
believed the revenues from congestion pricing would be wasted (Ibid.).
Bloomberg kept seeking emissions cuts by improving the public transit
system. He campaigned in 2009 on a pledge to make cross-town buses free,
but recanted the promise after his re-election (Grynbaum 2009).
Bloomberg also sought to increase large buildings’ energy efficiency
through aggressive legislation. Nevertheless, he backed down and adopted
a much more modest plan in the face of the real estate sector’s opposition
(Navarro 2009).
Between 2007 and 2009, the city’s tentatively cosmopolitan, low-carbon
policies were framed in global terms and advanced at home and through the
C40 policy network. Most of this effort was undertaken under President
George W. Bush, who was hostile to climate action. From late 2009 onward,
in part because of the financial crisis, Bloomberg gave less emphasis to his
stagnating climate agenda. Sandy’s devastation in late 2012 offered an
opportunity to reinvigorate it.
Bloomberg seized the moment, signalling a return to climate policies five
weeks after the storm:
Over the past five years . . . we’ve reduced the City’s carbon footprint by
16 percent, and we’re well on our way of meeting our goal of a 30 percent
reduction by 2030 . . . The biggest challenge that we face is adapting our city to
risks associated with climate change (Bloomberg 2012).
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 9
Bloomberg opened and closed the speech with discussions of the city’s
campaign to help property owners paint building roofs white (to reduce
summer heat and energy use for air conditioning) as the emblem of his
administration’s low-carbon efforts. The remainder of the speech focused on
adaptation. He did not mention public transit, the most contentious and
equity-oriented climate policy that he had previously advocated. Meanwhile,
the 16% GHG emissions reduction figure that Bloomberg cited was
misleading.
The contemporaneous December 2012 City of New York audit of GHG
emissions found that reductions mostly resulted from developments beyond
City Hall’s control, especially milder weather and the substitution of natural
gas for coal in power plants feeding the city (Dickinson et al. 2012). The
emissions associated with vehicle transit remained near 2007 levels. By the
city’s own reckoning, municipal policies had yielded emissions reductions of
approximately 7%, largely thanks to the phase-out of inefficient, highly
polluting heating oil (Ibid.).
Meanwhile, the Bloomberg regime’s pivot to adaptation outlasted the
storm’s immediate aftermath. On 11 June 2013, nearly nine months after
Sandy, the administration released the 400-plus page planning document,
A Stronger, More Resilient New York, better known as the Special Initiative
on Resiliency and Rebuilding (SIRR) report (City of New York 2013b). This
was Bloomberg’s climate policy legacy. The ubiquitous focus on adaptation
crowded out decarbonization. The 2007 PlaNYC notion of leadership
remained, but its scope had shrunk to city limits:
Let others endlessly debate the causes . . . of climate change. New York City has
chosen, once again, to act . . . taking decisive and comprehensive steps to
prepare and adapt . . . If we take action now, we will make New York City
stronger, safer, and more resilient – not only for our own benefit, but for the
benefit of future generations of New Yorkers (City of New York 2013b, p. 8).
No longer accountable to the world, New York was now narrowly respon-
sible to its own grandchildren – implicitly reinscribing a boundary between
‘us and them,’ contra Beck’s cosmopolitanism. The rise of resiliency dis-
course followed these cues.
Debate on New York’s climate boundaries around the SIRR report
focused on material substance – oyster beds versus marshlands versus sea
walls. All sides implicitly accepted that climate politics’ geographic bound-
aries were now local. Where social questions were raised about political
responsibility, financial precarity and unequal social displacement in the
storm’s wake, these largely concerned storm victims residing on Staten
Island and the Jersey Shore (Koslov 2016) – or, at their most distant,
Caribbean victims of Sandy’s damages. The Bloomberg regime and its civil
society partners did seek to spread lessons learned about adaptation to other
10 D. A. COHEN
cities, a material form of global solidarity. But in the context of the extremely
high carbon footprints of affluent people in prosperous cities like New York
(Cohen 2016, Rice et al. 2020), global adaptation leadership represented
a diminished concept of solidarity.
The data demonstrating the shift in New York’s climate politics from
tentative cosmopolitanism to defensive parochialism do not explain it.
Understanding this shift requires inference. On my reading of the documen-
tary evidence, Bloomberg and his Office of Long-Term Planning and
Sustainability chose the path of least political resistance. Selective continuity
meant declining to revisit earlier decarbonization policy stalemates, while
channelling a reactive public opinion to support new adaptation policies.
Meanwhile, the shift preserved the administration’s commitment to marrying
ecological policy with the real estate and financial industries’ prosperity.
A renewed focus on decarbonizing large buildings, and a fresh look at local
consumption’s global emissions, might threaten the city’s prosperity. Indeed,
the post-Sandy focus on fortification and redevelopment, modelled on the
revitalization of Wall Street after the September 11
th
, 2001 terror attacks,
solidified a new synthesis between sustainability discourse and climate lea-
dership (now re-framed around adaptation), and the city’s real estate and
financial sectors (Gotham and Greenberg 2014). The Bloomberg regime
maintained selective continuity by developing an adaptation-focused climate
policy that preserved its political economic coalition with wealthy local
interests, at the cost of low-carbon action.
Nevertheless, elements of PlaNYC’s low-carbon vision quietly survived
the shift in marginalized form. City officials continued to pursue low-carbon
building retrofit measures with minimal public notice. Without fanfare, on
the last day of Bloomberg’s administration (31 December 2013), the Mayor’s
Office of Long-Term Planning and Responsibility uploaded a report titled
‘New York City’s Pathways to Deep Carbon Reductions’ (City of New York
2013a). It outlined an 80% cut in GHG emissions by 2050, a significant
acceleration of the original PlaNYC’s target, largely through increased build-
ing retrofits. Overall, proposed measures would create thousands of jobs,
slash energy bills, and ‘integrate carbon reduction and climate resiliency
objectives’ (Ibid, p. 12). The report recalled PlaNYC’s original cosmopolitan
ethos. Even if New York missed its targets, the report agued, it could
demonstrate ‘global leadership’ and become a ‘living laboratory’ for low-
carbon urbanism (Ibid, pp. 10, 12–13).
The fortress of solitude
How did justice-oriented civil society groups react to the Bloomberg regime’s
top-down reframing of climate politics around adaptation? Mostly, commu-
nity organization leaders, union leaders, and volunteer responders argued in
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 11
interviews with the Superstorm Research Lab that Sandy had disproportio-
nately affected poor, disempowered and vulnerable populations – and resi-
liency policies and rebuilding efforts should acknowledge and redress these
inequalities.
Of ten community and labor leaders we interviewed, only two spoke
strongly about the need for New York City to keep pursuing GHG emissions
reductions. Nearly all focused on equity and vulnerability. One community
organizer working in the devastated Red Hook neighbourhood emphasized
the difficulty of recovery logistics, then continued ‘and the climate change
questions obviously are beyond us,’ before laughing nervously. No one in this
group voiced disagreement with the new, exclusive adaptation focus.
As elaborated below, I characterize New York City’s overarching climate
politics after Sandy, its ‘emergent regularities or logics’ (Sewell 2005, p. 221),
in terms of the metaphor of a fortress of solitude.
For community groups grappling with post-Sandy struggles, the primacy
of immediate needs was intense. As a leading organizer with the New York
Alliance for a Just Rebuilding explained:
If you don’t have a home you can afford, if you don’t have daycare for your
children, or you live somewhere where it’s far away from transportation, then
it’s going to be harder for you to get back on your feet . . . But hopefully we
learn from . . . Sandy and from some upcoming storms and get to a place where
we can really call ourselves resilient and we can really . . . prioritize low-income
folks and vulnerable populations and make sure that they’re okay after disaster.
She continued that while the Alliance, a coalition of labor and community
groups, was interested in clean energy projects and sustainable urbanism, in
the short term it needed to focus on social needs.
The Alliance’s July 2013 report Turning the Tide emphasized four prio-
rities: good jobs, affordable housing, sustainable energy and community
engagement (Alliance for a Just Rebuilding 2013). The third was the least
developed, with only a few paragraphs devoted to carbon emissions (Ibid.,
p. 10). The more detailed report of the Sandy Regional Assembly (2013a),
a second large grouping of social justice-oriented groups, outlined similar
priorities, with scant discussion of decarbonization. The adaptation focus
prevailed despite years of low-carbon advocacy by some of its most promi-
nent member organizations, like the Harlem-based WE-ACT for
Environmental Justice.
3
Responding to New York’s SIRR Report, the Sandy
Regional Assembly (2013b) issued a response report that re-emphasized their
original focus on ensuring a more equitable recovery. The environmental
justice groups and their allies mostly preserved continuity with their long-
time emphasis on equity, while directing their climate focus to adaptation.
4
What about volunteer responders and Occupy Sandy activists? The latter
composed the best-organized grassroots response to Sandy’s devastation,
12 D. A. COHEN
mobilizing up to 60,000 volunteers (Ambinder and Jennings 2013). The
Superstorm Research Lab spoke to 20 members of this network (and 16
additional volunteer disaster responders).
Mostly, when Occupy Sandy activists addressed climate change in inter-
views, they spoke in terms of local adaptation and fortification against later
storms; they argued that these efforts should be effective, fair and based on
community leadership. One Occupy Sandy volunteer said, ‘I’m of the belief
that I’m not interested in climate change from the perspective of global
warming, CO
2
rising, because to me it feels like a red herring. If instead we
built up people’s sense of injustice around their local environment then,
collectively, problems will get solved.’
Other Occupy Sandy activists spoke of circling back to decarbonization
eventually, but in vague terms. One respondent said:
I think it makes sense that people are talking about adaptation right now
because it’s most relevant in terms of how people rebuild and where to rebuild.
Another activist noted that, ‘people sort of talk more about bikes than they
used to. I mean, there are some small things, you know?’ A further respon-
dent referred to recent organizing efforts to block two natural gas pipelines
planned for the city.
One of the few respondents to raise clean energy said, ‘the best that we can
do is start immediately looking into renewable, renewable ways of energizing
our planet.’ Overall, of 18 Occupy Sandy activists we spoke to, five strongly
indicated that some level of government should be acting to reduce emis-
sions or expand clean energy; just two cited specific city-level ways to
decarbonize.
For most Occupy Sandy activists, it was easier to react to the storm’s
exogenous shock by moulding a new focus on climate adaptation to long-
standing projects of social and economic justice. These activists’ approach
exemplified Rebecca Solnit’s (2009) thesis that grassroots disaster response
can create anti-market, communitarian self-organization that implicitly cri-
tiques an unequal economic order (see also Dawson 2017). Nevertheless,
with an issue as complex as climate change, a locally utopian response of
mutual aid can still reinforce a defensive social logic that forecloses broader
political solidarities.
I term New York’s broad, post-Sandy focus on adaptation a ‘fortress of
solitude’ logic, a metaphor referring to feudalism, where subalterns are
invited to seek protection behind the lord’s fortress’s walls from threats
without. Subalterns benefit from these walls, and may seek to soften the
inequalities within. By accepting this arrangement (under duress), local
subalterns are walled off from comparable groups in other places, weakening
their position. In prosperous, post-industrial cities, elites’ power flows not
just from local, but also from global arrangements (Brenner 2014, Sassen
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 13
2014), just as the emissions caused by local consumption occur physically
faraway. The farming and industrial work that undergirds New York’s pros-
perity, and most climate impacts of those emissions, occur beyond city limits.
The fortress of solitude metaphor dramatizes the broad acceptance of
New York climate politics’ newly parochial orientation – especially, the
willingness of community groups and activists to accept elites’ localist fram-
ing to seek improved conditions within. The metaphor spotlights difficult
trade-offs: sacrificing broader solidarities across space for the promise of
short-term enhancements in economic and physical security, in the solitude
of an (ostensibly) delimited city.
Despite the fortress’s limitations, efforts within may still prepare more
ambitious political struggles. In theory, if emphases on local economic and
social security, grassroots democratic agency and contesting elites could be
connected to a plausible decarbonization project, it should be possible to
contest the confining logic of the fortress of solitude.
Escaping the Fortress
On 18 April 2019, thanks to organizing from progressive groups like the
Working Families Party, New York Communities for Change, and the
New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, New York City passed the
country’s most ambitious low-carbon buildings bill. I attended the vote in
City Council. Speaker after speaker in the council chambers and press
conference linked the bill to Sandy’s destruction. In political terms, however,
almost two years had passed between Hurricane Sandy and the start of the
campaign that would culminate in the 2019 bill, a process I sketch briefly
here.
The massive September 21
st
, 2014 People’s Climate March set the devel-
opments in motion. On the Friday before the march, the new mayor Bill De
Blasio announced that the city would cut its GHG emissions by 80% by 2050,
repurposing the plan released on the final day of Bloomberg’s administra-
tion. De Blasio’s subsequent revision of PlaNYC, retitled One New York,
solidified the 80% target, while emphasizing the social and economic justice
dimensions of his sustainability policy (City of New York 2015).
One New York’s ambitious climate targets did not flow directly from post-
Sandy organizing, however, but rather subsequent events. Organizers
planned the 2014 march in reaction to the United Nations’ (UN) calling
a climate summit at the UN as a stepping-stone toward the December 2015
Paris climate negotiations. I have learned through more recent interviews
that following the announcement of the New York UN summit, climate
activist groups like 350.org decided to organize the march, and contacted
environmental justice organizations, Occupy Sandy organizers, unions, and
other community groups. The march did not foreground decarbonization. It
14 D. A. COHEN
was only afterward that organizers forged the ‘Climate Works for All’ coali-
tion (Align n.d.), which campaigned for low-carbon building retrofits to help
meet the city’s new climate targets.
The new coalition included groups from the Alliance for a Just Rebuilding
and Sandy Regional Assembly, which now linked creating union jobs and
preserving affordable housing to decarbonization, forging a novel continuity
between social movement demands and a low-carbon agenda – a connection
powerful enough to secure the 2019 bill passage.
A deeper analysis of this process is beyond the scope of this study. Still,
this timeline demonstrates that low-carbon organizing arose well after
Sandy. Sandy’s memory contributed. But weather was not the decisive factor
in shaping the particular substance of climate policy action, which flowed
instead from actors’ responses to the UN summit and other strategic con-
siderations, shifting the political content of the activist groups’ selective
continuity.
Conclusion
I have sought to conceptualize and explain a dramatic shift in New York City’s
climate politics. I have characterized the city’s post-Sandy policy shift, from
a decarbonization-focused tentative cosmopolitanism to an adaptation-focused
defensive parochialism, in terms of a ‘fortress of solitude’ social logic. This was
not an automatic result of the weather itself. Rather, a variety of political actors’
evolving and intersecting projects, maintaining selective continuities of outlook
and practice in response to external shocks, created a new social logic.
Senior disaster officials doubled down on adaptation as their primary
climate focus in Sandy’s wake to maintain many of their familiar outlooks
and practices. To understand the top levels of the Bloomberg regime’s
climate policymakers’ shift in climate policy focus to adaptation and defen-
sive parochialism, and to understand the acceptance of this shift from a range
of grassroots groups and activists following the storm, I situated actors’
response in their relationship to power structures, community dynamics
and political economy. Elites forged new, adaptation-focused climate policies
to take the path of least political resistance, while maintaining their favoured
model of economic development; grassroots groups focused on redressing
social and economic inequalities.
I have not argued that a prosperous city, damaged by climate-linked
extreme weather, will necessarily prioritize adaptation over decarbonization.
Rather, this is liable to happen when adaptation better aligns with groups’
prior outlooks and practices in a process of selective continuity. An adapta-
tion emphasis can crowd out decarbonization. As extreme weather disasters
increase in frequency, and urban climate policies circulate rapidly, we should
worry about an urban world that looks like a series of fortresses of solitude.
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 15
In affluent cities, so-called ‘urban adaptation justice’ (Shi et al. 2015) cannot
exist without strong commitments to decarbonization. For a prosperous city
like New York, with ample resources and high consumption emissions,
focusing only on the city’s grandchildren – however equitably – hardly
seems just (Cohen 2020).
I also demonstrate how commitments to decarbonization can survive
shifts in policy focus, then regain prominence. Experience of extreme
weather could also yield greater policy focus on both decarbonization and
adaptation, if groups align more climate policies with prior outlooks and
practices. For instance, in the United States, the idea of a Green New Deal
links investment in adaptation, decarbonization and equity (Cohen 2020).
Urban actors could work with groups beyond city limits on transforming
energy systems, curbing the influence of the fossil fuel sector, and other
strategies to decarbonize the global economy.
Admittedly, building theory through case studies limits the immediate gen-
eralizability of qualitative, relational sociological approaches. Nonetheless, by
elucidating the mechanisms of political change – breaking open the black box of
responses to extreme weather – we deepen our understanding of how interac-
tions between multiple political actors forge new policy frameworks (George and
Bennett 2005). Research on other cities could further explore the interface
between post-disaster climate policy and climate governance networks
(Bulkeley and Betsill 2013), domestic climate policymaking, and a growing
climate movement. A better understanding of how mobilized political projects –
not the weather – do the work of climate politics is no cause for despair.
Notes
1. I borrow the phrase from Jonathan Lethem’s novel about Brooklyn’s gentrifi-
cation; the book’s plot and title, Fortress of Solitude, evoke a mood of eerie,
artificial isolation. Lethem was referencing the ‘fortress of solitude’ of
Superman mythology.
2. Affluent centers of consumption like New York, and especially their wealthy
neighbourhoods, have extremely high carbon footprints when measured with
consumption accounting, irrespective of density (Cohen 2016, C40 2018, Rice
et al. 2020). New York City acknowledged the limits of its territorial account-
ing method in 2009 (City of New York 2009, p. 6), promising to undertake
a consumption count. By 2020, it still had not done so.
3. For examples, see WE-ACT, ‘A Conversation on America’s Climate Choices’,
http://www.weact.org/Projects/CleanAir/AmericasClimateChoices/tabid/
622/Default.aspx <accessed 3 February 2014 >.
4. One exception to the trend of adaptation emphasis was El Puente,
a Williamsburg-based environmental justice group that founded the Latino
Climate Action Network to coordinate climate activism between New York
and Puerto Rico.
16 D. A. COHEN
Acknowledgments
I thank my colleagues in New York University’s (NYU) Superstorm Research Lab
for their creativity and hard work. For their feedback on earlier drafts, I thank the
anonymous reviewers, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Neil Brenner, Rebecca Elliott, Colin
Jerolmack, Eric Klinenberg, Steven Lukes, Kasia Paprocki, the members of the
Lab (in particular Liz Koslov), and the NYLON research network. I thank our
interviewees and outside collaborators for sharing their time. I thank NYU’s
Institute for Public Knowledge and Office of Sustainability for funding the Lab’s
research.
Disclosure statement
The author does not gain any financial interest or benefit from the direct applications
of their research.
Funding
This work was supported by the New York University, Office of Sustainability [NA];
New York University, Institute for Public Knowledge [NA].
ORCID
Daniel Aldana Cohen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0396-7316
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