Resumen de Racialization and Rescaling: Post-Katrina Rebuilding and the Louisiana Road Home Program

Kevin Fox Gotham

• This article examines the interlocking nature of racialization and rescaling inpost-Katrina New Orleans, focusing specifically on the implementation of the LouisianaRoad Home program, the largest housing recovery program in US history. Based oninterviews and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I conceptualize the Road Homeprogram as a racialized spatial strategy to revalorize disaster-devastated spaces andenhance the exchangeability of damaged property. I trace the logic of rescaling inpost-Katrina New Orleans and reveal the ways in which state policies to accelerate theturnover time of flood-damaged housing reflect and reinforce the racialization of space.New Orleans stands as a valuable laboratory for the study of government interventionunder conditions of widespread upscaling, downscaling and outscaling processes,pushing trends found elsewhere to their limits while revealing the negative consequencesof rescaling for local institutions and residents. The article illustrates the localizeddynamics of rescaling in times of crisis and offers a novel processual account of thedrivers and consequences of rescaling processes in a disaster-impacted territory.