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This book is a timely and urgent study on how the financialization of rental housing by investment firms is reshaping urban climate adaptation with a particular focus on the coastal city of Norfolk, Virginia. This region presents a key example where rising seas and rising rents- two of today s major socio-economic and environmental challenges- are colliding. Attuning to a social geography of adaptation and finance, its chapters, dispatches from the frontlines of these twinned crises, are developed through the distinct views of individuals who navigate and contest the liquidation of their city by finance and by flood.
From boardrooms to the rubble of public housing, the book details how adaptation plans turn climate risk into bankable assets, how a mobility trap forces renters into flood-prone neighborhoods, and how flood resilience was weaponized to displace Black public housing residents. Liquid Cities charts an ascendant financial sovereignty over urban adapted futures, ultimately offering concrete policy ideas for ensuring that renters are not left behind in this compelling account of capital, water, and one region's fight for its future.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: It s all science fiction. .- Chapter 2: The Coastal Community of the Future.- Chapter 3: Geography of Extraction: Renting in the Liquid City.- Chapter 4: The Battle for St. Paul s: Adapting Public Housing for Private Profit.- Chapter 5: Financial Sovereignty in the Age of Climate Politics.- Chapter 6: Reimagining the Liquid City.
About the author
Alexander Fella teaches at Tidewater Community College, in Norfolk, where he also works as a social epidemiologist with the Norfolk Department of Health on issues related to housing, overdose deaths, and food access, among others. He previously taught anthropology at Christopher Newport University. In 2022, Fella founded CityWork, an organization that provides free, public, GIS research to empower housing advocates in the Hampton Roads region. A former fellow of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, Fella holds a master’s from Yale University. He splits his time between Norfolk and Montréal, Québec.
Summary
This book is a timely and urgent study on how the financialization of rental housing by investment firms is reshaping urban climate adaptation with a particular focus on the coastal city of Norfolk, Virginia. This region presents a key example where rising seas and rising rents- two of today’s major socio-economic and environmental challenges- are colliding. Attuning to a social geography of adaptation and finance, its chapters, dispatches from the frontlines of these twinned crises, are developed through the distinct views of individuals who navigate and contest the liquidation of their city by finance and by flood.
From boardrooms to the rubble of public housing, the book details how adaptation plans turn climate risk into bankable assets, how a mobility trap forces renters into flood-prone neighborhoods, and how flood resilience was weaponized to displace Black public housing residents. Liquid Cities charts an ascendant financial sovereignty over urban adapted futures, ultimately offering concrete policy ideas for ensuring that renters are not left behind in this compelling account of capital, water, and one region's fight for its future.
