This presentation critically interrogates the ascendancy of adaptation as a central developmental and urban governance imperative in the context of ceaseless crises. Rather than addressing the root causes of disasters—climate, economic, political—adaptation frameworks are predominantly oriented towards managing their effects. This logic reflects the normative force of consensus theories and neoliberal rationality, closely aligned with the TINA doctrine. Under its influence, a discourse of resilience has emerged as both technocratic response and ideological project, producing docile, self-governing subjects in a perpetually destabilised world.
I examine how this adaptive paradigm is operationalised in contexts shaped by layered and interlocking crises – natural disasters, forced displacement, colonial domination – transforming cities into laboratories for post-political governance. It draws on empirical examples from New Orleans and Athens to the deeply militarised and colonially structured urban spaces of the occupied Palestine, highlighting how “adaptation” and “resilience” become a vehicle for advancing state and market interests, often legitimising violent spatial reconfigurations. The ongoing genocide in Gaza starkly exposes the violence of adaptation as a governing rationality. Here, the technocratic logics of reconstruction, cynically demonstrated by US and Israeli plans for turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East”, are mobilised in tandem with settler colonialism, urbicide, and ecological devastation, rendering visible the terrifying convergence of military occupation, ethnic cleansing and neoliberal (re)development. By foregrounding the processes of subject formation that the notion of adaptation entails, the presentation seeks to unsettle its depoliticised aura and open space for critical engagements with crisis—not as a condition to be adapted to, but as a terrain of struggle over life, space, and futurity.
Alkisti Prepi is an architect (ENSA Paris-La-Villette) and holds a PhD in Urban Planning and Urban Sociology from the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Her research is situated within urban social geography, urban development policies and planning, spatial and social inequalities, segregation, and alternative urban imaginaries—particularly in the geographies of the Global South. She taught Cultural History and Theory at the School of Architecture, University of Crete, and has been contributing to postgraduate teaching at NTUA since 2019. She is a member of the Organising Committee of Historical Materialism Athens and an active member of the Association of Greek Architects.