Managed urban retreat: the trouble with crisis narratives

Rahman, M. Feisal, Lewis, David ORCID: 0000-0003-0732-9020, Kuhl, Laura, Baldwin, Andrew, Ruszczyk, Hanna, Nadiruzzaman, Md and Mahid, Yousuf (2023) Managed urban retreat: the trouble with crisis narratives. Urban Geography. ISSN 0272-3638

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Abstract

In response to narratives of the mass movement of people triggered by climate change, a number of “managed retreat” models have been proposed as policy options, especially for densely populated urban areas in the Global South. Reviewing a case study from Mongla, a secondary city in southwestern Bangladesh, we argue that a “crisis narrative” unhelpfully informs current discourses of “climate migration”, and oversimplify complex realities, creating the risk that urban policy makers design managed retreat interventions that are poorly informed and maladaptive in that they may be accepted too uncritically, take overly technical forms, and may exacerbate rather than reduce the risk faced by those they are purportedly intended to assist.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rurb20
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Author(s)
Divisions:	International Development
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General) G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences
Date Deposited:	25 May 2023 16:21
Last Modified:	18 Nov 2024 18:09
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/119266

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