Disaster recovery for whom? insurance, zoning, and the exclusionary geographies of wildfire resilience

Disaster recovery after wildfires is often framed as rebuilding to restore communities to their pre-disaster condition. We argue that recovery following a disaster can also function as a mechanism of spatial governance that produces exclusionary development by shaping who is able to return. Focusing on recovery after the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, we combine 35 semi-structured interviews with residential insurance data and neighborhood-level changes in housing and labor characteristics. We show that post-fire rebuilding is increasingly structured by the interaction of fire-adaptive regulations, building codes, and insurance market behavior, which together raise the financial thresholds for reconstruction. As recovery proceeds, informal, low-cost, and ad-hoc housing is displaced by formal, risk-managed, and insurable development, reshaping both the physical geography and the social composition of wildfire-affected neighborhoods. In the context of increasingly catastrophic wildfire disasters, these findings underscore the need for recovery frameworks that pursue physical safety without reproducing displacement, and that explicitly prioritize equity and long-term affordability.