In June 2012, the Oxford English Dictionary (at www.oed.com/view/Entry/224872, accessed 13 June 2014) added a new sense to its entry on the adjective “vulnerable,” designating “a person in need of special care, support, or protection (esp. provided as a social service) because of age, disability, risk of abuse or neglect, etc.” That this addition appeared at a time when individual vulnerability to economic forces and ecological crisis has become increasingly evident seems telling. The growing concern in the United States (and elsewhere) about poverty, unemployment (especially among young people), job insecurity, homelessness and climate change, including the wide-ranging debates surrounding “precarity” and the “precariat,” suggests that contemporary life might now be defined by a distinct vulnerability.

In their very different ways, two new books published by Duke University Press take vulnerability – in its social, economic and ecological forms – as an essential feature of the contemporary American city. For Vincanne Adams, in Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith, the recovery process in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 is “a foreshadowing of a future that could belong to anyone, a catastrophic revelation of vulnerability not just of a few Americans but of an American way of life” (181). If the OED highlights “social service” provision for the vulnerable as a vital constituent of the term's meaning, then Adams's book exposes those who now profit from this provision and the devastating consequences this entails. In Fluid New York, May Joseph argues that the impact of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 dramatically changed New Yorkers' perceptions of their own vulnerability, especially on the island of Manhattan, in the face of rapid climate change. “To live in Manhattan is to live vulnerably” (58), she claims, but her bold and expansive reading of the city is also a celebration of the possibilities that urban life, and the notion of cosmopolitan citizenship, still holds.

Vincanne Adams, a professor of medical anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco, who spent twenty-five years in Asia studying international development prior to writing Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith, stresses that her book is not about the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, but about “the disaster of stalled and prolonged recovery” (1). From the outset, the recovery process is powerfully voiced by the residents of New Orleans themselves. The individual stories Adams includes, taken from 163 interviews conducted for the book, feature accounts of remarkable pain, desperation, generosity and hard work, as daily life became a battle with horrendous living conditions (few books on an American city can have featured so much mould and mud) and exasperating authorities. Adams is generous with her quotes, providing extended passages which allow distinctive individual voices to emerge, and she is especially attentive to the mental-health issues provoked by the recovery process. One man, for instance, is so deeply traumatized by the struggle to rebuild that he is told, “you have become a gutted house” (119), while another claims “Katrina savvy” is essential to develop when faced with outrageous delays to insurance claims and the complex bureaucratic procedures attached to public compensation (76). A market-driven approach to recovery meant that, in seeking support, the most vulnerable people were forced “to think of themselves as entrepreneurs” (69) or were treated “like a commodity – a source of surplus value” (70). Notably, the suicide rate tripled in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina and the city's residents discovered, in Adams's words, “how easy it is for any American to find how porous the system of social support is under neoliberal capitalism” (52).

These poignant personal accounts imbue Adams's book with distinct affect, a term she scrutinizes in detail. At the heart of Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith is an analysis of the “affect economy” – that is, an economy that uses affective responses to suffering and vulnerability to extend inequality, with Hurricane Katrina triggering both “armies of free labor” and “opportunities for new corporate capitalization” (10). Illustrating the latter claim, disaster relief contracts were handed on a noncompetitive basis to private companies (including Blackwater, apparently paid $250,000 a day for its work in New Orleans, and Halliburton, who earned $124.9 million in contracts following the disaster), many of which had no prior experience in humanitarian assistance. Disaster capitalism, most prominently discussed by Naomi Klein, is a prevailing notion here.Footnote ¹

Yet philanthropy, or rather philanthrocapitalism, is also a central part of the “affect economy” that Adams critiques. The latter part of her book closely examines the charity sector and the multitude of faith-based groups, grassroots organizations and volunteers involved in the recovery process. This includes the neighbourhood rebuilding efforts in New Orleans recently documented by Karl F. Seidman,Footnote ² but Adams places these labours within a much broader political economy, one in which the very idea that government should be responsible for helping the needy is itself vulnerable. In contrast to Seidman's emphasis on the successes of local and charitable groups, Adams reminds us that “such movements often adopt the same views as those who may be responsible for creating problems of disenfranchisement to begin with” (159). What is more, charity and volunteer groups are increasingly forced to take on private-sector models of success and organization – using the same neoliberal accounting procedures, statistical reports and targets, and even promoting investment portfolios. Thus volunteer efforts, she concludes, by no means eliminate social inequalities. Indeed, in some ways, “they are only making it worse” (155).

Within the already vast literature that Hurricane Katrina has provoked, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith stands out as an exemplary ethnographic account, combining extraordinary local stories with a rigorous analysis of the national (and even international) implications of the recovery process. The book allows us to see the aftermath of Katrina in the context of a political economy which has created “a pervasive vulnerability and fragility among more and more people” (72). Rather than being a catastrophe of the past, the ongoing disaster in New Orleans “tells us a lot about what the future holds for U.S. citizens” (176).

At the beginning of Fluid New York, May Joseph makes the case for Hurricane Sandy's prominence in determining the city's future development and the consciousness of its citizens. She claims, with the boldness that defines her book as a whole, that the storm “marks a major turning point in New York City's history, equivalent in seismic shift to the impact that 9/11 wrought upon the city” (2). Not only were failings in the city's infrastructure and services exposed – “New York seemed more Third World than I had ever imagined” (209), Joseph admits, and mould makes a vivid appearance here, too – but suddenly its coastal location and vulnerability to climate-related emergencies were brought sharply into view. Hurricane Sandy allows Joseph to frame a much wider environmental history of New York, which pays close attention to how water has shaped the city – from the archipelagic structure of Manhattan to the development of the waterfront under Mayor Bloomberg.

Whereas Adams deliberately avoids retelling New Orleans's famed cultural history (avoiding all but the briefest of references to Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street and so on), in a bid to show how much that city is like other American cities (and thus emphasizing how much its suffering could be replicated elsewhere), Joseph incorporates the myths and legends of New York, albeit with new points of emphasis, with a focus on the city's exceptional nature. In particular, her version of New York emphasizes its vital colonial importance, including its role in maritime traditions and trading routes. Rather, however, than a more conventional transatlantic perspective on the city's past, it is New York's relations with the Pacific and Indian Oceans, via Dutch colonial expansion, that are discussed in rich and evocative fashion. This reorientation towards the east continues into the present-day features of the city, as Joseph examines the various meanings provoked by the Ghandi statue in Union Square Park and a trip by the Dalai Lama to Radio City Music Hall.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of her analysis is its style. Joseph, professor of social science at the Pratt Institute, is constantly probing and prodding, a restless examiner of urban change driven by the relentless energy long associated with New York. Paragraphs often unfurl with lengthy sentences and frequent lists – as if determined to index the entire city and its every nuance, she includes an inventory of alternative modes of transport and a catalogue of ethnic identities, and outlines the imaginary geographies provoked by a single train route – before concluding with a sweeping statement. She maintains a predilection for superlatives – the Hudson River is “the greatest hydrological experiment in North America” (47) and Manhattan is “the most influential artificial environment for human interaction in the world” (56) – though there are moments when the search for grandeur or affect feels strained: “Modern metropolitanism is a montage of manifestoes” (77). The difficulties writers confront in theorizing New York today – so heavily documented by generations of urban thinkers, not to mention novelists, artists and filmmakers – might be linked to the distinctive language Joseph employs. New York is, she tells us, both “endlessly interesting to write about” (8) and “the most overexposed city in the world” (101). Despite the latter constraint, her evident delight in New York, where she has lived since 1992, imbues the book with a surprising freshness.

Furthermore, the book's interest in urban ecology, and water in particular, operates at the levels of its style and organization. Though Fluid New York is divided into four parts and a dozen chapters, its rhythms are not constrained by this structure. The argument ebbs and flows, tosses and turns, with underlying currents and thematic tides that return periodically. Different ideas, eras and sources flow into one another to perform (a word important to Joseph's argument) a notion of fluid and cosmopolitan citizenship.

Her sustained emphasis on the political possibilities of urban life is especially welcome. Joseph is absolutely opposed to a key trend, noted by many other scholars, now shaping American cities: “exurbias are becoming the new city, and the inner city is transforming into the new suburb” (67). As suburban lifestyles, often through a process of gentrification, come to dominate large areas of Manhattan, in particular, Joseph demonstrates (in her attention to different ways of inhabiting the streets and rivers, and the competing and complimentary flows that New Yorkers from all backgrounds bring to the city) a distinct commitment to urban life: the joys that it can bring and the difficulties it inevitability involves. Indeed, her optimistic tone suggests that even a shared ecological vulnerability might lead to new forms of urban cooperation and citizenship in the future.