| The dissertation is a study of how communities and institutions struggle to rebuild after natural catastrophe. Recovery is inevitably a moral project: different images of the world are selected to make action morally meaningful. Social factions and institutions respond to the moral challenge of restoring the built environment by reaffirming, modifying, and vigorously arguing about the images of nature, their local community, human need, and virtue that lay behind it. Three case studies show how institutions and social fractions blended, incorporated, expanded, and acuminated elements of extant moral languages--the discourses articulating these images--into "rhetorics of recovery." They did so in an institutionally de-differentiated environment, a collective liminal state brought on by natural catastrophe.; The first case looks at how the clergy of San Francisco justified morally the community's return as a center of commerce. The earthquake devastated the built environment of early 20th century San Francisco but recovery followed. Guiding it was a moral creole composed of pre-earthquake millennial conceptions of nature, civil society, and human need in the Pioneer capital of California.; The second case study looks at reconstruction after the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the central coast of California. The temblor destroyed the signature commercial street of the paradisaical California beachfront town of Santa Cruz. Leftist political and environmental activists, the "progressive" municipal government, business owners, and local landlords built a strikingly different street to replace it. Even so, they preserved pre-disaster moral understandings. In rebuilding the main street, oppositional social fractions found common cause in a new version of the local civic religion of exceptionalism.; The third case examines the struggle to rebuild the landmark St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church in Watsonville. One group employed a rhetoric displaying their immigrant toughness and farmer's independence. Another articulated the universalism of the Catholic Church. Together they demonstrated the richness of the local religious world, where different images of the church competed to become the controlling image of the new built environment. |
