Every year, as jasmine gives way to elderflower and the Gulf Coast settles into its long wait for the hurricane season, New Orleans residents, in the United States, run through a familiar checklist: track the storms, stock the pantry, know the evacuation route. But there is a gap in that checklist that state and federal preparedness guides rarely address: what happens when the phones go dark. Communication networks are consistently among the first systems to fail in a major storm, and when they do, entire communities are cut off not just from each other, but from the support systems that determine who gets seen, and who gets help, in a disaster's aftermath. As climate change makes storms stronger and recovery periods longer, this is not a rare glitch – it is becoming a defining feature of disaster response itself.
This is the problem that led to SwampNet, a project born in 2023 to build alternative communication infrastructure for mutual aid networks in New Orleans. But digging into the technical history of the wireless networks powering that infrastructure led to an unexpected discovery: a decades-long lineage of community-built networks that have emerged, again and again, from the wreckage of infrastructural collapse. This report, developed as part of the Call for Narratives on community-centred connectivity initiatives and environmental justice, traces that lineage through three storms – Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and Hurricane Ida in 2021 – to make a case that these grassroots networks are more than stopgaps for when "real" infrastructure fails. They prove that communities can build communication infrastructure on their own terms, especially as climate instability makes that kind of resilience essential.
Read the narrative here.
Jen Liu is a researcher and designer interested in building alternative infrastructures for liveable and equitable climate futures. She has been a co-steward of SwampNet since 2023.
Monique Verdin is an art maker, wild gardener, story keeper, citizen of the Houma Nation and steward of the Land Memory Bank. Monique co-stewards Bvlbancha Liberation Radio and the urban earthwork Nanih Bvlbancha, and is a SwampNet collaborator.
SwampNet is a collaborative experiment with autonomous and alternative digital infrastructures that operate as archives and as channels for emergency community communications. It began its work in 2023 to design, develop and steward community and place-based technologies in Bvlbancha/New Orleans and across the Gulf South area of the United States.
All authors were consulted regarding the use of AI, following APC policy on AI-generated content guidelines, which prioritise transparency. The authors of this work reported that "AI was not used directly for this piece – indirect use came from the AI overviews from search engines (Google, DuckDuckGo) during research for this piece".
About Call for Narratives
The Call for Narratives on community-centred connectivity initiatives and environmental justice brings together proposals from different regions and countries around the world, featuring a variety of community environmental concerns to address the ways in which CCCIs are facing climate change, caring for the environmental issues affecting their territories and developing strategies to act in their different contexts. Find all the selected proposals here.
This call was launched in the framework of the COP30 following which the LocNet initiative developed a series of activities to highlight the intersection of community-centred connectivity and socio-environmental justice, recognising that communities are often at the frontline of both the territorial and environmental impacts of technology, as well as the consequences of climate change. Learn more about this initiative here.
The LocNet initiative is a collective effort led by APC and Rhizomatica in partnership with grassroots communities and support organisations in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. This call is part of its “Meaningful community-centred connectivity” project implemented with financial support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and UK International Development from the UK Government through its Digital Access Programme. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the supporters’ view, but that does not make them any less valuable.