ABSTRACT
This paper mobilizes theories of the state, discourse and social innovation in order to critically examine the role of institutional structures – predominantly the state – in incubating resilience in a post-disaster housing construction context. The main ambition is to shed light on the ways institutional structures respond to the challenge of governing a heterogeneous and dynamic landscape of housing policy implementers, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic, who consider and implement ‘recovery’ in radically different ways, and who fight, discursively and materially, for their right to participate in the rebuilding experiment. The position, reposition, and constant presence of different housing policy implementers in socio-institutional arenas holds the potential to ‘force’ institutional structures to readjust their modus operandi, allowing thus for the possibility of new governance configurations which could also lead to more egalitarian post-disaster urbaninites. By empirically examining the recovery of New Orleans post-Katrina, we will better equipped to discuss the conditions under which resilience can be incubated.