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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

Dr. Knowles points out the structural failures of the World Trade Center due to steel beams and poor fireproofing material. Dr. Knowles connects the burning of the Capitol Building in 1814, the 1850 Hague Street boiler explosion in NYC, and Chicago’s Iroquois Theater Fire of 1903 to convey the different aspects of a structural disaster. The Capital Building focused on the investigation, the importance of the sentimental value of the building, and rebuild it as well as the difficulties involved with doing so. The Hague Street Explosion investigation attempted to pinpoint the root cause of the disaster, but after thorough investigation there were many failures at many different levels which led to the ultimate failure. The Iroquois theater fire revealed issues with public policy, regulation compliance, and public perception in addition to its investigation.

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seanw146

1) “The logic of state soverignty in the control of migration clearly prevailed over the universality of the principle of the right to life.”

2) “By analogy with the therapeutic mesasures applied at the end of life for patients suffering from illness deemed incurable, we can describe the measures and procedures devised to allow foreign patients without residence rights to stay in France, receive treatment, and have their living costs paid, as a compassion protocol.”

3) “Precisely because he or she is illegally resident, the sick immigrant may undertake medical tests or seek treatment under a different name, so that the cost of treatment is coverd, or simply to avoid being denounced and deported.”

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seanw146

1)            Personal trauma: this includes not only the direct, immediate effects of the disaster but also the long-term mental and physical effects from the disaster.

2)            Way of life disrupted “disaster capitalism”: the next part of the syndrome includes business taking advantage of the situation for profits; the main case being private companies profiting off of federal funding to rebuild the homes and lives of the citizens who were affected.

3)            Displacement: the well-off are able to relocated after the disaster has ended but for those less fortunate, there permanent effects are worse, and there is little they can do to relocated to their homes and communities after the superficial aspect of the disaster have ended.