How maps make time

Abstract

Practices of remapping and rezoning land based on environmental risk are rapidly expanding worldwide. Designating certain urban areas as “at risk” in the context of climate change raises familiar conflicts over space and the fraught placement of borders and boundaries. It also gives rise to lesser-studied struggles over time. This article examines such temporal conflicts through a case of disputed risk mapping in New York City. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork over a four-year period after Hurricane Sandy, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was revising the city’s Flood Insurance Rate Maps, or FIRMs. FIRMs divide land into zones of risk to set insurance rates and building standards. They dictate how high exposed homes must be elevated and who can afford to live in them. This article adds to work on the social consequences of risk mapping, which in FEMA’s case is occurring in conjunction with changes to the National Flood Insurance Program that portend rate hikes for many households. Foregrounding the lived experience of being mapped into a flood zone, the article analyzes conflicts over how FIRMs represent risk, redistribute uncertainty, and reorient collective action in ways that threaten to hinder movement toward more flood-adapted futures. While maps are key to rendering the risks of climate change vivid and local, their use as technologies of governing adaptation produces its own contested effects, centered in part on competing temporalities like the flood-zone temporalities examined here.

Key words:

• climate change
• risk
• disaster
• time
• flooding
• maps
• insurance
• uncertainty

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to everyone who shared their experiences and insights with me during fieldwork. I also thank the many readers whose comments on earlier drafts helped strengthen this version immeasurably. Funding was provided by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge and Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at MIT.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Fear of such claims helped drive the decision in North Carolina—a state that once banned the use of sea level rise projections in policymaking—to defund landslide hazard mapping and remove existing maps from public view (Gustafson 2015, 144).

2 For looks inside the black box see Monmonier (1998, 2008), Rumsey (2015), and de Vries (2011).

3 I discuss further implications of this way of seeing flood risk in Koslov (2019, 7).

4 Proponents of reform tend to frame the program’s debt as resulting from people in flood zones not paying their fair share; flood-zone residents, meanwhile, focus on the government overreach of being told where not to live, and government culpability for producing flood risk. Masked here, and by FIRMs, is the mediating role of private insurance companies, which write policies and handle claims on behalf of the NFIP without taking on its financial risk, borne by taxpayers. Payments to private companies play a significant role in the NFIP’s costs (Michel-Kerjan 2010, 166), but have largely escaped oversight (Sullivan 2016).

5 Some flood maps produce uncertainty with intent; as Porter and Demeritt (2012, 2365) report, the UK’s Environment Agency makes maps whose larger scale provokes planning authorities to consult the agency, lending it more power over development than it might otherwise possess.

6 The 100-year floodplain boundary can have a similar effect in and of itself (Patterson and Doyle 2009, 237).

7 Elliott (2019) makes a similar point, noting the “new collective political identities created by the map itself, like ‘flood zone homeowners’” (18). On how other media facilitated Stop FEMA Now, see Checker (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Liz Koslov

Liz Koslov is Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. Email: [email protected]