Coastal Climate Resilience through the Racialized Redistribution System: The Uneven Effects of Racial Capital on Adaptation and Place Attachment in Norfolk, VA

Place attachment – the affective bond between a person and their environment – has been hypothesized to lead to place-protective behavior in circumstances where a community or environment is threatened with change. However, in coastal Norfolk, Virginia, destructive, racialized, historical policies of urban development have not been mitigated by any form of protection. Today, the urban planning and redevelopment in the City have become fixated on climate change and sea level rise. Environmental effects and disruptive coastal adaptations in the City are inequitably distributed among communities, reprising earlier displacement and maintaining 20th-century segregation through 21st-century planning initiatives of climate adaptation and resilience. Wealthier areas of Norfolk also face sea level rise and flooding, but the repeated waves of destruction and removal in minoritized zones and districts demonstrate a pattern. This predictable process of displacement and replacement is explained by synthesizing theories of early ecological resilience and racial capitalism into a framework explicated here as the Racialized Redistribution System, or RRS. This analysis tool posits that the value of Whiteness distorts other forms of capital and urban space itself. The investigation thus moves beyond the adaptive cycle to demonstrate that pools of capital, here dubbed domains of attraction, either endlessly lose capital or accumulate it on the RRS. Findings indicate that racial capitalism in Norfolk operates as a continuous cycle of repeated losses of capital in minoritized communities; that climate adaptation and sea level rise resilience stand as the most recent mechanism of siphoning capital from non-White domains of attraction to White ones; and that residents’ have a significantly wider range of concerns and opinions about Norfolk than the climate change topics explored in academia and the media. Theories and practices of place attachment, resilience, and racial capitalism can challenge dominant paradigms of coastal resilience and climate adaptation, addressing the following questions: ‘How do the climate change discourse and the planning discourse inside and outside the City of Norfolk VA conceal and foster displacement policies in the City? How does place attachment interact with displacement pressure from current climate policies and historical planning policies in the City?’