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Paper long abstract

Following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami under the banner of disaster risk reduction large scale integrated resettlement site were developed in the coastal city of Chennai in India. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic research conducted nearly two decades after the tsunami, this paper demonstrates how such post-disaster resettlement has, over time, produced new and uneven layers of risks.

The findings show that technocratic, top-down recovery and resettlement processes have generated long-term vulnerabilities through spatial segregation, ecological disregard, institutional incapacity, and political decision-making shaped by elite interests. Rather than reducing risk, these interventions have reconfigured it in ways that disproportionately affect already marginalised populations. The paper highlights how women and gender minorities were particularly affected due to failure in recognising the socio-cultural practices, livelihood systems, and everyday forms of care in the long term recovery processes. At the same time, this research demonstrates that affected communities are not just passive recipients of state-led adaptation and recovery. They actively engage in making the spaces viable through incremental housing extensions, everyday solidarities, and practices of resistance. These practices directly challenge dominant technocratic framing of disaster recovery and adaptation.

By situating peripheral resettlement as a site for disaster recovery, this paper argues that disaster-induced recovery must move beyond expert-driven models to centre community-led, embodied, and relational knowledge as fundamental to climate justice. .