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St. Louis Anthropocene: displacement & replacement

JJP

A brief essay about St. Louis' notorious eminent domain history--

--along with 2 recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch articles about "urban renewal" projects that are scheduled to reoccupy the Mill Flats area, which hosted the most notorious episode of displacement of African-American communities: the Chouteau Greenway project (will it serve or displace low-income St. Louisans?); and SLU's Mill Creek Flats high-rise project, which certainly will, and whose name seems to me an especially tone-deaf if gutsy move...

https://humanities.wustl.edu/features/Margaret-Garb-St-Louis-Eminent-Domain

https://www.stltoday.com/business/local/steelcote-developer-plans-more-apartments-brewery-space-in-million-midtown/article_811eaf96-76e1-5c20-a870-1e79abd3f06e.html

https://www.stltoday.com/business/local/chouteau-greenway-project-aims-to-knit-st-louis-neighborhoods-together/article_55fea4e6-6829-5c80-9168-313305b4e3bb.html

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joerene.aviles

1. “Chronic disaster syndrome” thus refers in this analysis to the cluster of trauma-and posttrauma-related phenomena that are at once individual, social, and political and that are associated with disaster as simultaneously causative and experiential of a chronic condition of distress in relation to displacement.

2. Most efforts to rebuild health care facilities focused on emergency care, routine care, and surgical services rather than psychiatry.

3. For many people, the idea that they had to stay in a state of heightened response to the pending “crisis”—a state they had already been in for over two years—produced huge anxiety and exhaustion.

4. Instead, the notion that New Orleanians themselves were a threat to public or national security circulated and became a rationale for the efforts the government did take to effect change in New Orleans. This change, in effect, targeted the poor. The poor, it seems, were to be evicted from New Orleans as a way to “clean up” the city and help it recover once and for all.

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joerene.aviles

1. Arguably, the new Ukrainian accounting of the Cherobyl unknown was part and parcel of the government's strategies for "knowledge-based" governance and social mobilization. In 1991 and in its first set of laws, the new parliament denounced the Soviet management of Chemobyl as "an act of genocide."

2. On the one hand, the Ukrainian government rejected Western neoliberal prescriptions to downsize its social welfare domain; on the other hand, it presented itself as informed by the principles of a moder risk society. On the one hand, these Chernobyl laws allowed for unprecedented civic organizing; on the other hand, they became distinct venues of corruption through which informal practices of providing or selling access to state privileges and protections (blat) expanded.

3. Government-operated radiation research clinics and non- governmental organizations mediate an informal economy of illness and claims to a "biological citizenship"-a demand for, but limited access to, a form of social welfare based on medical, scientific, and legal criteria that recognize injury and compensate for it.

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joerene.aviles

The author of the article seemed to conduct their research from NPR reporters in Haiti, interviews with various organizations (U.N, Center for Economic Policy and Research, and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti), and other reports (one from the  U.S. Government Accountability Office was referenced). 

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joerene.aviles

The main argument is that previous disasters involving burning buildings in US history and the subsequent investigations affected emergency response, policy making, and disaster investigation today. These past events can be applied to the 9/11 terrorist attack and investigation of the buildings afterward.

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joerene.aviles

The policy was created in in 1999 after concerns brought up by the Team Leader of the Chemical Weapons Improved Response Team (CWIRT), U.S. Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command over whether first responders to WMD (weapons of mass destruction) incidents were liable for pollution and other environmental consequences of their decontamination/ life-saving efforts.

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joerene.aviles

The article's main points cover the major challenges impeding research studies on violence that affects health service delivery in "complex security environments". The problem isn't lack of data regarding violence affecting health service delivery, but the lack of "health specific" and "gender-disaggregated" data, or data that's not completely tied to humanitarian aid.

The authors suggest several ways to increase research: increased collaboration between academia, NGO's, and health service organizations, inserting a research component in aid operations, and increasing funding to academic and aid organizations.