After the flood: Disaster capitalism and the symbolic restructuring of intellectual space

While corporate strategies for fostering innovation seek to benefit from university models of knowledge-sharing and development, the adoption by universities of managerial models from business has met with more critical reaction from within. 'Academic capitalism' has been seen as a contradiction in terms. In the aftermaths of 9/11 and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the American Gulf Coast, investigative journalist Naomi Klein has called attention to the phenomenon of 'disaster capitalism'. Disaster and conflict, she writes, have become alibis for radical restructuring. Have 'academic capitalism' and 'disaster capitalism' coincided? This paper examines, as a narrative case study, the events in a university school of architecture involved in post-disaster reconstruction, with emphasis on the particular characteristics of the design academy. It suggests that the open intellectual and social space of the university was radically re-engineered as a space of control: that freedom of investigation and exchange that innovative businesses sought to emulate was now itself under threat in the very institution where it had originated. This paper seeks to identify the specific mechanisms of this inversion and their consequences.