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Paper short abstract:

The aim of the proposed paper is to show how the advent of a natural disaster often becomes an extraordinary market opportunity for accelerated development and resource redistribution dynamics, able to lead to touristification and gentrification processes.

Paper long abstract:

Disaster Research studies have often shown that the results of a natural disaster can flow into dynamics of accelerated processes of resource extraction and/or unequal distribution of collective resources. In fact, according to the «Disaster Capitalism» perspective (Alexander, 2010; Klein, 2007), fear and disorder arising from a natural disaster can become an extraordinary market opportunity. In this way, the territories affected by a disaster can assume the dramatic role of a blank sheet on which entrepreneurs and investors can apply radical measures of social and economic engineering (Klein, 2007). It is through this strategy that, following a socio-natural disaster, large portions of coastal regions are handed over to powerful entrepreneurs who build luxury tourist villages; in the same way, entire urban districts become the scene for an urban redevelopment process that replaces social housing with modern and upper-class buildings (Gotham & Greenberg, 2014). This paper aims to connect theories and practices of both Platform Capitalism and Disaster Capitalism, with particular attention to the forms of resistance and responses that emerge from them. This connection will be presented through the lens of Environmental Justice, both on a theoretical and empirical level, and supported by the mapping tool of the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (www.ejatlas.org). The latter is a project that brings together academics and activists aiming to show and enlighten the multiple and heterogeneous existing forms of resistance to the enhancement of Nature (Leonardi, 2017) and to multiple attempts to keep collective resources at the margins of marketing processes (Escobar, 2008).