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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 – with its logics, discourses, actors and materiality – to respond to such challenges.

Paper Abstract:

The Haitian capital has long been an urban space with a great geospatial divide between the wealthier, living in tightly gated hilltop communities and the poor, mostly the displaced ones who are forced to reside in slums and poor neighborhoods along the harbor and on the foot of the hills. The 2010 earthquake exacerbated the inequalities and the social divide in the city, which 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. The perfect example of such processes is the creation of the township called Canaan, extended about 27 km to the North of the Haitian capital, and which forced the Haitian government to adopt certain urban policies to formalize the informal settlements.

But what housing and urbanization challenges were created or amplified following the 2010 disaster? How natural and climate disasters in Haiti reactivate matters – policy processes, urban designs, resilience and solidarity – and bring new, albeit imperfect, urbanisation policy solutions to city’s growing challenges?

I argue that the economic fragility, political unrest, colonial legacies, the high risk of natural disaster and the effects of climate change, exacerbate the inequalities along racial and social divides by looking into how housing needs were met and dealt with in the management of this crisis.