Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the urban challenges of the Haitian capital city Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of 2010 and the urban governance – its logics, discourses, actors and materiality – to respond to such challenges.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the urban challenges the Haitian capital city Port-au-Prince has faced in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of 2010 and the urban policies – its logics, discourses and materiality – to respond to such challenges.

Following the 2010 earthquake, about 1.5 million internally displaced Haitians were located in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, adding pressure to a fragile housing and urban infrastructure. Such massive displacements gave rise to many camps and other makeshift dwellings and provoked an extended sprawling of the informal settlements, which further exacerbated the inequalities and social divide in the city. In some cases, it led to pushing the poorest displaced Haitians out of the urban areas, by blurring and extending the boundaries of the city into informal urban spaces. Concurrently, such massive displacements forced the government and other actors to rethink certain urban policies and regulations in order to accept, formalize and extend these new urban spaces. Through the case of Port-au-Prince and Caanan township urbanization processes, I examine the political materiality of such processes by addressing the following questions: How natural and climate disasters in Haiti reactivate matters – policy processes, ideas, urban designs, resilience and solidarity – and bring new, albeit imperfect, urbanisation solutions to city’s growing challenges? How does the transformation of the urban space in Port-au-Prince reflect the social tensions and inequalities exacerbated by the disaster, violence and climate stresses?