The Resilient city: how modern cities recover from disaster

Though cities are always shaped by destruction as well as construction, the particular history, forms, and problems of urban reconstruction became exceptionally salient in the United States after September 11, 2001.The destruction of the World Trade Center--or, more precisely, the predominant narration of that destruction by U.S. politicians and the media outlets that reiterated them--yielded a newly-heightened interest in how cities respond to disaster in both popular culture and academia.This book is one of several edited collections that have grappled with postdisaster reconstruction in the wake of September 11.To varying degrees, the historical moment of these books--that is, the aftermath of September 11--has conditioned their enunciation of the history of reconstruction.In the case of The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster, this conditioning is especially consequential.At the same time, however, through the depth of the essays collected within it, The Resilient City far surpasses previous edited volumes on urban reconstruction that have come out since September 11.