Settlement shifts in the wake of catastrophe

Abstract Urban risk may be understood as a function of hazard (in the case of New Orleans, hurricane storm surge), exposure (human occupancy of spaces prone to the hazard, namely low-lying flood zones), and social vulnerability (the ability of humans to react resiliently after having been exposed to a hazard, which itself is a function of education, income, age, social networks, etc.) This research focuses on the second of those three variables, exposure, by analyzing empirically how postdiluvian residential settlement patterns have shifted both vertically (topographically) and horizontally (latitudinally and longitudinally). The results shed light on whether and how residents, spatially analyzed by race and ethnicity, have shifted their occupancy of the deltaic metropolis, and how those movements might affect exposure to future hazards.