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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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Andreas_Rebmann

It appeared to be mostly a compilation-based study, amassing and comparing previously completed research to reach the conclusion and build the argument in the paper. Primarily, the author cited outside sources for all of the “heavy-lifting” science, and was primarily drawing the over-arching conclusion about the relationship between natural disasters and epidemics.

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Andreas_Rebmann

It has been cited 5 times, in three papers (The World Trade Center Analyses: Case Study of Ethics, Public Policy and the Engineering Profession; Engineering Risk and Disaster: Disaster-STS and the American History of technology; Making Sense of Disaster) and two books (Expanding the Criminological Imagination: Critical Readings in Crimonology; The Martians Have Landed!: A history of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes).

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Andreas_Rebmann

"(Survivors) told us that they were experiencing ongoing “displacement” in the sense that their lives had not returned to normal, even though they were back in their “place of residence.”

"Depression and anxiety disorders were pervasive. Many residents had regular nightmares of waking up in water. They talked about recurring “breakdowns” in which they became overcome with emotion and physically collapsed. A 2007 study showed that 20 percent of New Orleans residents were categorized as having a Katrina-related serious mental illness, and 19 percent showed signs of minimal to mild mental illness (Sastry and VanLandingham 2008; Thomas 2008)."

"Margot, an elderly woman still living in a FEMA trailer next to her destroyed and as yet unrebuilt home, described the problem: 'I haven’t had a mail box in three years, OK. I mean symbolically that’s it right now. I don’t even have a mailbox. You know, if you want to put it in one sentence. I am just tired of not having a mailbox, ya know, because I don’t know where I live.' "