Luka Hamel-Serenity

Models of the Past, Visions for the Future: Explicating Resilience, Racial Capitalism, and Place Attachment through Adaptive Cycles in Norfolk, VA

Place attachment – the positive affective bond between a person and their desired environment – has been hypothesized to lead to place-protective behavior in circumstances where a community or environment is threatened with change. However, in coastal Norfolk, Virginia, destructive historical policies urban planning and development have not been mitigated by residents’ place sentiments and protective behavior. Today, the urban planning policy discourse in the City has become fixated on climate change and sea level rise. Climate effects and adaptation in the City are inequitably distributed among communities, reprising earlier displacement and maintaining segregation. 21st-century planning initiatives of climate adaptation and resilience leave minoritized residents to again face the gentrification and displacement generated by 20th-century urban planning. While wealthy areas of Norfolk also face sea level rise and flooding, the repeated waves of destruction and removal give the appearance of a pattern that can be modeled by ecological resilience theory: an adaptive cycle of racial capitalism. Drawing from this panarchy model of systems change developed by CS Holling and others, this dissertation develops a more complex framework of the adaptive cycle which better approximate the repeated losses of capital affecting low-income and minoritized Norfolk communities. Findings from this study indicate that racial capitalism in Norfolk operates as a continuous cycle made of repeated phases of loss of capital; that climate adaptation and sea level rise resilience stand as the most recent phase of this modified adaptive cycle; and that residents’ place attachment, protective behavior, and other place sentiments are spread across a much wider range of issues than sea level rise and development alone, breaching issues from community identity to the future of their families in Norfolk. Theories and practices of place attachment, coastal and ecological resilience, and racial capitalism can be synthesized to address the following questions: ‘How do the climate change discourse and the planning discourse inside and outside the City of Norfolk VA conceal and foster displacement policies in the City? How does place attachment interact with displacement pressure from current climate policies and historical planning policies in the City?'

Luka Hamel-Serenity did his undergraduate work at Princeton University in 2016 (highest honors) and earned a Master of Architecture from Portland State in Oregon in 2020. As of September 2024, Luka lives in Norfolk, VA and serves as full-time faculty at Hampton University’s Department of Architecture. He co-teaches first-year studio and co-leads instruction on the Adaptation to Sea Level Rise seminar series.