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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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seanw146

The main narrative of the film “In the Shadow of Ebola” is to show the impact from the top to bottom of the disease and the response to that disease. This includes international decisions affecting the nation of Liberia, the national government’s actions affecting the local communities and families there. Disease awareness and infrastructure are the main focus.

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1) “It has been six months, and nobody knows who is responsible for what. It is a disgrace.”

2) “Six months after the World Trade Center collapse, the greatest structural disaster in modern history, people were still seeking to answer the question: why exactly had the Towers collapsed?”

3) “With the exception of federal oversight, Iroquois set the tone for investigation of modern disaster from the Baltimore Conflagration (1904) to the World Trade Center collapse.”

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seanw146

1) ‘New Orleans offers an example of the perpetuation of a “state of emergency” that was initiated by Katrina but has been sustained by ongoing politicoeconomic machinery—a machinery that ultimately needs to “have a disaster” to justify its existence.’

2) “…the idea that they had to stay in a state of heightened response to the pending ‘crisis’- a state they had to already been in for over two years- produced huge anxiety and exhaustion.”

3) ‘This chain of events prompted residents to say things like: We all asked, “Who was meaner: Katrina, Rita or FEMA? And everybody’s pointing at FEMA.” ‘

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seanw146

1) “The issue at stake is the state's capacity to produce and use scientific knowledge and nonknowledge [sic] to maintain political order.”

2) "Today, approximately 8.9 percent of Ukraine is considered contaminated."

3) “Dr. Guskova, who oversees the Russian compensation In Russia, the number of people considered affected and compensable has been kept to a mini-mum and remains fairly stable… told me that Ukrainians were inflating their numbers of exposed persons, that their so-called invalids ‘didn't want to re- cover.’ She saw the illnesses of this group as a "struggle for power and material resources related to the disaster.”