Survival, Responsibility and Restoration: an anti-hero urban ethics in times of disaster.
Catherine Trundle - Victoria University of Wellington
This paper asks how urban ethics, and ideas of the good, just city, emerge and get built on the back of ruinous events. Three sudden and calamitous recent events in Aotearoa New Zealand threatened to rupture the social fabric of urban life: a deadly white supremacist attack on an inner-city Mosque, an earthquake, and most recently, a pandemic. These events fractured, in a literal sense, buildings, bodies, communities, businesses, neighbourhoods and families. They each entailed an immediate ethics of emergency focused upon the protection of life, followed by a longer tail of social action and moral deliberation. In this talk I will reflect upon the small everyday ethics of care, repair, responsibility and safety that appeared in the shadows of the heroic morality of disaster response. In these we see emergent, fragile modes of urban interdependency, autonomy and vulnerability, ethics that have the potential to recast the city as a vibrant space of imperfect restoration.