Notes from a Post-Flood Feast

If degrowth already exists, it will be findable—and touchable, tastable, smellable—in disaster zones. But the variety of degrowth encountered in these zones will be a somewhat spicy, mutated version; like an eccentric cousin with much to teach. Most degrowth scholarship emphasizes its planned nature: a gradual, thoughtful reduction of resource use, apportioned fairly between different economies overshooting their entitlements to our planetary commons.4 Advocates argue that through care-full intervention and democratic planning, forms of economic and cultural life will emerge that reflect sustainable, regenerative, and liberatory horizons.5  

Degrowth in disaster zones is not that. It is improvisational. It aspires to something much humbler—survival at low material throughput on the climate frontline—but achieves something much more interesting, akin to what Richard Seymour and others might call a “salvage communism.”6 It feels like Styrofoam-packed meal drop-offs and plastic water bottles stealthily liberated from poorly guarded grocery stores. It tastes like the aforementioned solidarity slurry, or, on a good day, World Central Kitchen slop. It sounds like loud mumble rap from a comrade’s awful playlist overlaid with a lanky teenager practicing the flute while his mom waits in line at the mutual aid distro. It happens in squatted schools, in old warehouses, in strangers’ pickup truck beds, and always, inevitably, on the streets. 

Disaster mutual aid has already been studied extensively, by everyone from scholars and journalists to urban planners and military strategists. Many popular studies of disaster, like Rebecca Solnit’s Paradise Built in Hell (2009) or Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine (2007), have shaped public discourse about the potentials and pitfalls of making disasters into sites of political action.7 A familiar story emerges from much of this research: disasters happen, and communities rally to help each other in beautiful displays of care and connection; meanwhile, authorities and elites rush to thwart any truly emancipatory possibilities by protecting their wealth and resources. Inevitably, the status quo re-exerts itself as life goes “back to normal,” and the windows briefly opened into another world are jammed shut. People and organizations might be transformed, but communities as a whole rarely manage to dislodge the machines of “disaster risk creation” that created the conditions for disaster in the first place.8  

In a moment where the realities of disaster are becoming increasingly omnipresent due to escalating climate change, these dynamics are due for a re-evaluation. Investigating the materialities, spatialities, and imaginaries of disaster zones can reveal what an improvisational degrowth looks like in practice, as struggles for survival in disaster blend into other metabolic struggles over livelihoods, care, and ecologies. Such an investigation is especially urgent in a moment where frequent disasters are inviting maladaptive innovations from growth-obsessed elites and planners, who are betting our collective survival on lucrative adaptation projects and complex insurance (really, betting) markets.9 Even on the left, threats of disaster have historically conjured Promethean schemes deployed from above, like the megadams that “tamed” the Yellow River after centuries of flooding in China.10 Grand infrastructural bets may have their place, but there are also softer paths to adaptation.11 The tools, spaces, and cultures we need to survive the turbulent near-future are here already, being deployed in creative ways by people who are rarely ever the protagonists of the resilient city.

Brigades, Committees, and Funerary Rage 

Cross the Atlantic from New Orleans to Valencia, reversing the voyages of Catalan-Valencian settlers and slavers in Spanish Louisiana, and you end up on another contemporary climate frontline.12 This time I am staring at an enormous paella at a “festival of gratitude for the volunteers.” It is November 2025, and Valencia has just recently marked the one-year anniversary of the catastrophic DANA floods that took 230 lives and left thousands of people in its southern neighborhoods devastated.13 This was no ordinary flood; the Mediterranean has been changing, decade after decade, and familiar “cold drop” (gota fria) storms have become turbocharged with heavier rains linked conclusively to climate change.14 Estimates suggest that Valencia received the equivalent of one year’s rainfall in the span of eight hours.15  

I am at Parque Alcosa, a historic site of struggle at an occupied social center that has served stigmatized communities in the area for decades. Parke Alcosa was a nerve center for mutual aid organizing in the aftermath of the DANA, and that day I was surrounded by the laughter of brigadiers. Groups of firefighters, rescue workers, technicians, plumbers, and electricians from across Spain were in attendance, often in matching team T-shirts or high-visibility vests. They had formed the more professionalized part of the famous brigadas voluntarias, or volunteer brigades, that came to Valencia in the weeks and months after DANA to rescue, care for, and rebuild the lives disrupted by the disaster.16 A year before I had been part of one such brigade, organized by a coalition of communist and left groups, but that day I was surrounded by a much more politically diverse crowd. 

As we began a ceremonial parade around the neighborhood, a number of things about the procession piqued my interest. A few volunteers from the Scientology church were marching right behind Sikh community representatives, the latter dressed crisply in starched suits for the occasion. A circus-like performance was taking shape in the childcare area, where a volunteer was regaling cooing children with stories about a dinosaur. As we walked, we were greeted by smatterings of applause from neighbors poking out of their windows and balconies along the area’s housing blocks. Grief, laughter, reflection, and music all commingled as people put their hands on the floodlines, humbled by the indelibility of mud.

On the 29th of every month since the disaster, Valencians take to the streets, giving voice to the rage and helplessness and grief they still feel, months and now a full year after the disaster. These mobilizations have tended to center on demands of accountability against the person most visibly responsible for the catastrophe: the President of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón. But these street mobilizations also served to inject vitality into another collective structure: the Comités Locals d’Emergència i Reconstrucció, or CLERs. Faced with the reality that official warning systems failed (immortalized in the oft-stenciled graffiti “20:11,” signaling the late hour when the emergency alert arrived), Valencia’s afectados coalesced around a new structure that exists somewhere between a neighborhood council, a prepper collective, and a cultural organization.17  

Graffiti marking “20:11 NI OBLIT NI PERDÓ,” referring to the late warnings that arrived at 8.11 p.m.—translating to “don’t forget, don’t forgive.” Photo: David Gilbert, November 2025.

In the months after the DANA, CLERs rallied neighbors around a host of activities, from building communication networks of walkie-talkie users to facilitating debates on reconstruction priorities, all taking place in venues like local bookshops, municipal libraries, central plazas, and picket lines. Almost everyone I asked about their introduction to these disaster councils told me some version of the same story: it began with someone they knew from their sports team, or reading club, or festival organization, or their kids’ school, or some other leisure club. Valencia’s southern commuter towns, once described to me by an interlocutor as its cinturon rojo (red belt) for the militancy that its working-class residents have shown over the decades, were “organized” in the fabric of everyday life well before the disaster. The needs these councils were used to addressing were concrete: the daily sustenance and life of hundreds of residents living in buildings that, despite cosmetic repairs, still barely function as habitable spaces for elderly people living with reduced mobility and damaged elevators. In the weeks and months after the flood, volunteers shuttled between kitchens in the city and neighborhoods like Paiporta and Catarroja with hot meals and even drinking water.

Time often twists itself strangely in disaster zones. The initial hours and days stretch themselves into what feels like an eternity, whereas the months of slow, post-disaster waiting tend to get compressed into an unremarkable blob. This is the interminable limbo between response, reconstruction, and recovery. Much disaster scholarship critiques the rosy picture of “people helping people” in this stage, because it is in these moments—when the urgency has subsided but the pain remains—that groups previously united in crisis may start to fracture.18 The insistence on the punctual “29th of the month” protests in Valencia, however, breaks the fog around this temporality and stitches diverse movements back together. 

Exactly a year after DANA, there were two very different funerals taking place: one in the glimmering “white elephant” City of Arts and Sciences, featuring the King of Spain and other dignitaries, the families of some victims, and other major political figures in Spain.19 Another funeral, further south, happened in the affected neighborhoods and was led by the CLERs themselves, in a somber march filled with torches and placards dedicated to the victims. I walked with the latter procession for several hours, moving through the strange transformation of those neighborhoods—some lots still shuttered and marked by floodlines, others freshly renovated and flanked by gleaming new SUVs—bearing witness to the incomplete struggle against disaster capitalism. Regional and national recovery funds had largely been swallowed up by large corporations, and fierce resistance was still being mounted against the growth-centric recovery plans being imposed from above, against the will of communities that have long articulated their critiques of Valencia’s unsustainable growth model.20

As rain poured down upon the mourners, the procession ended in the square in front of the public library in Benetusser, one of Valencia’s worst-hit neighborhoods after the DANA. Fiery speeches followed, articulating the rage of the afectados, the needs of the victimas, and the demand for a radical transformation to upend a corrupt social order that had put people in harm’s way and left them to die. A week later, Carlos Mazón announced his resignation.

Flame trees in bloom on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba. July 2025. Photo: Feroz Khan.

Repair, Maintenance, and Care

In their call for a “salvage communism,” the Salvage Collective claims that our planetary emergency necessitates that “all politics must become disaster politics.”21 In their assessment, shared by many sober observers of the world system, it is already too late. Whatever emancipatory project or alternative we articulate, it will have to go through a lengthy process of repair and restoration before we see anything like abundance again, whether radical or Promethean.22 Disaster zones offer a window into what repair looks like as an ethic applied across an entire territory.

Across the Atlantic again, back toward the Caribbean, is perhaps the highest density of repairers on Earth in still-surviving Cuba. This time I am on an exploratory research visit to learn more about the island’s remarkable hurricane response outcomes, long held up as an exemplary model by the United Nations. For all of the contradictions in Cuban society (and there are many, as both defenders and critics of Cuban socialism will readily admit), one thing that has survived decades of siege is an ethos of repair, tinkering, and sensing. Small-scale technologies are repurposed and re-deployed in a multitude of ways by students, amateur tinkerers, and veteran engineers alike, for everything from commandeering electrical voltage from a nearby solar panel to monitoring water levels on a small urban farm. As a result, in advance of storms, electrical transmission infrastructure is dismantled, and reassembled after evacuations. 

When I asked a group of young university students in Havana about a much-vaunted institution—the “Committees to Defend the Revolution,” or CDRs, which spread the culture of maintenance and preparedness that make Cuba’s hurricane response so exceptional—they chuckled. 

Really, you guys don’t have anything like those? We all have to do it [serve in the CDRs], starting in school.… It’s kind of annoying, like the snitch of the neighborhood who scolds you if your trash blocks the canal. But we know why it works.

I was struck by the banality with which these students described something quite remarkable: working class neighborhoods and communities where infrastructure is truly attended to, even if municipal services withdraw or state-run provisioning systems fall apart. Steven Jackson once described repair as “subtle acts of care,” juxtaposing the articulation and reconfiguration of life against the centrifugal forces of a broken world.23 In Havana, amid rolling blackouts caused by an ongoing siege, hurricane winds charged by climate change, and a morass of economic and currency reforms, these subtle acts and modes of attention continue to sustain the invisible foundations of life. As Yifan Wang and Changwen Chen put it, invoking the Chinese repair influencer A-Bin: 

“The point of repair is that if you can repair it, you don’t want to upgrade it.” Another world is possible, but maybe that other world is not so much an upgraded one as a repaired one, healed from the naturalcultural traumas inflicted by hierarchical classes.24  

Resisting the allure of upgrading for repairing, maintaining, scavenging, even looting, disasters also re-politicize surplus. The warehouses and supercenters with stockpiles of our survival needs are locked away and guarded by taxpayer-funded police squads to prevent “disaster looting,” which itself is largely a racialized myth.25 But lockpicking, commandeering, surplus raiding, and other piratical modes of action are themselves acts of a certain kind of care in the aftermath of disaster, an insistence that the needs of hungry infants and elders without electricity are more important than private profits. Everywhere from Cuba’s hospitals to Gaza’s desalination plants, disaster zones inaugurate new life.26 That life is messy, neither thriving nor collapsing, and certainly not reducible to neoliberal “resilience,” but surely surviving and struggling in the twinned labors of resistance and repair. 

Disaster brings the repairers, salvagers, pirates, and carers within each of us into the fore, revivifying politics with an insistence on using what is already at hand. Crucial to its success is the conviction that reparative labor is joyful, not drudging work. Cleaning mud in Valencia, distributing Styrofoam-packed meals in New Orleans, and waiting for the lights to come back on in Cuba, I was struck by how frequently peals of laughter and song would cut through distressing situations. Someone might be giggling at the mayor’s dishevelment in a press conference, breaking out into a raunchy song about hot linemen repairing the power lines, or fantasizing loudly about the post-cleanup kebab they were going to devour. If climate breakdown puts us collectively in the gallows, perhaps it’ll be gallows humor that sees us through the long repair on the horizon.