CEE Seminar: Managed Retreat from Floods Versus Wildfires: An Interdisciplinary Research Agenda

Abstract: “Managed retreat,” or planned relocation away from high-risk areas, is increasingly broached as a necessary response to climate-linked hazards. This talk draws on cases from New York and California to examine the challenges and questions that retreat poses as it moves across social, cultural and environmental contexts. It describes how the emerging geography of retreat comes into being, showing it to be neither wholly natural nor inevitable but rather the result of social dynamics, policy decisions, and patterns of uneven and racialized development that make some people and places more vulnerable and others relatively secure.

Bio: Liz Koslov is assistant professor of Urban Planning, Environment and Sustainability, and Sociology at UCLA. She holds a Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her research brings an interdisciplinary ethnographic approach to analyzing transformations of space and place in the context of climate change. She is currently writing a book about community organizing for home buyouts among coastal property owners after Hurricane Sandy.