Quote image editor
“Most people who survive a devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed; they want to reaffirm their relatedness to the places that formed them. 'When I rebuild the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself,' said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Night Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka, and New Orleans, the process deceptively called 'reconstruction' began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere and rooted communities, then quickly moving to replace them with a kind of corporate New Jerusalem - all before the victims of war or natural disaster were able to regroup and stake their claims to what was theirs.” — Naomi Klein