The political economy of the flu

In response to the email I sent out yesterday with a link to an interesting analysis of  the geopolitics of the flu , Bradie Williams from our class responded with this:

Something else that one could find interesting in this whole ‘swine’ flu hysteria is the impact on global economics. With reports being released about the pandemic potential of the flu, it seems that many governments defense mechanisms may be stretched too far. For example, the Chinese government has recently banned all pork imports from the United States, a severe overreaction considering the illness is not  food-borne at all. This action taken by China could lose farmers in the US upwards of a billion dollars. In terms of space and globalization, it’s amazing how a disease that will most likely never affect the farming communities here in the US may lead to their demise.

Bradie recommends this link to more debates and discussions on the political economy of the flu

State Street Park: revitalized or sanitized?

Thanks to Sarah Bennet for sending in this link from this week’s Isthmus on the ‘revitalization’ of Peace Park on State Street. The Isthmus asked the park’s current users about the proposed changes:

A 54-year-old man going by the nickname “Smooth”…likes Peace Park as it is.

“This is just the place we hang out,” says Smooth, who is passing a can of beer stuffed into a leather glove among his buddies. “It’s our little spot.”

Smooth, who is currently unemployed, says he hangs out at the park six days a week, from noon until early evening. He’s heard talk of renovations for years and seen some changes. For instance, the tall bushes behind which people would sometimes sleep (or have sex) have been trimmed low to the ground. He wonders if there isn’t another agenda.

“Sometimes change is a removal thing,” he says. “Urban renewal — I call that ‘urban removal.'”

[Alderman Mike] Verveer admits he’d like to remove some of the park’s reputation. “Over the years the park has been a magnet for street people,” he says. “It’s a place where people hang out. They’re not overall scary mean people, but there’s a perception that they’re scary.” He notes that the park was the first place police put surveillance cameras.

Read the full article here

Pirates, or the ‘Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia’?

Last week we talked about sovereignty as the ability to exert force and control over territory and population. The surge of piracy off the coast of Somalia provides a excellent way into understanding the (often naturalized) power of sovereignty by looking at the results of its collapse. A recent news article in the Huffington Post had this to say about pirates:

In 1991, the government of Somalia – in the Horn of Africa – collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas…

This is the context in which the men we are calling “pirates” have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a ‘tax’ on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and it’s not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters… We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.”

Read Johann Hari’s articule in the Huffington Post here: ‘You are Being Lied to About Pirates’

Watch K’naan’s video about Somolia and piracy here:

Where Race Lives: PBS interactive website on the geography of race and urbanism

Click on the picture below to learn more about how federal policies helped shape the racial geographies of suburbanization and ghettoization in US cities

The end of an era: the Brewster Housing Projects in Detriot

Nate Millington sent in this blog which speaks directly to the topic of our lecture today on postwar urbanization. The story documents the decline of the Brewster Housing Projects in Detroit. A quote from the blog:

View of Detroit from the Brewster Housing Projects

They were the first federally funded public housing development for African Americans, remnants of a time when black citizens faced restrictive covenants in land deeds that prevented them from moving into white neighborhoods. The projects were built when the development of I-75 displaced residents of the black neighborhood of Paradise Valley. Last year at this time, people were still living in several of the towers until the housing commission shut operations down for good. By June 2008, the only people living in the towers were squatters and scrappers diligently removing all recyclable metals from the four towers and numerous low-rises”

Read the full story on the projects in the Sweet Juniper blog here

Slumdog Millionaire: developmentalism on film?

The film Slumdog Millionaire has set of a heated debate in India, and rippled across the western World.

Protests outside the studio of actor Anil Kapoor

Alice Miles a reporter for the Times London Calls the film an example of ‘poverty porn’ – where a a grassroots, insiders view of the ‘the slums’ is served up for a voyeuristic western audience.

Sadia Sheppard, documentary filmmaker and author writes:

More troubling than Mr. Boyle’s facile characterization of life in Asia’s largest slum is how the national argument over India’s representation in popular culture seeps into the urban solutions proposed for Dharavi, notably a new redevelopment plan which would demolish the slum and relocate some of its residents to a complex of towers…a sentiment that goes hand in hand with Bollywood’s glossy view of reality.

Here is a link to a blog on the story : ‘The Real Roots of the ‘Slumdog’ Protests’

and the article in the NYTs.

PBS documentary Dharavi’s redevelopment

This video was sent in from your classmate Natasha Dockter on the redevelopment of Dharavi. I am having trouble embedding it, but it really is worth a watch:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/module.html?mod=1&pkg=033009india&seg=1

Geography of Segregation in US cities

Click on this link to maps of segregation levels in US cities,  based on 2000 US census data.

http://www.umich.edu/~lawrace/seg.htm

Scaling down the social geography of the earth

Erich Hanxlenden sent in this video called ‘The Miniature Earth’ which projects the social geography of our world at a scale of 100. It does a great job of revealing the huge inequalities among us, and the privilege that many of us in the ‘core’ enjoy.

Mumbai: Everyday Contradictions of Urbanization and Globalization

Mumbai

A recent essay by Anand Giridharadas in the NYT speaks volumes to the contradictions of Mumbai in the face of urbanization and globalization. This is a city where “luscious skyscrapers sprout beside mosquito-prone shantytowns”; where Bollywood–India’s answer to Hollywood–meets Dharavi, a slum where one million people inhabit one square mile. Giridharadas remarks that “these dueling claims on Mumbai explain its mongrel look: like a duty-free mall in parts, in parts like a refugee camp.” What does it mean to be an emerging global city and home to one of the largest slums in Asia? What do plans for Dharavi’s redevelopment have to do with the need for cities to compete in an increasingly globalized marketplace?

Processes of displacement within the context of urban redevelopment are not confined to places like Mumbai. As we begin our discussion of urbanization and gentrification we’ll begin to see similarities between what’s happening in Mumbai and Dharavi and cities in the western world. Read Giridharadas’ story, published along with a slide show, in the New York Times here