[CPEO-BIF] Critique of Healthfields

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

[This critique of developing public health facilities on brownfields raises important questions that face any brownfields redevelopment in environmental justice communities, but it should dampen one’s enthusiasm for healthfields. Community oversight is essential in brownfields redevelopment to 1) ensure that cleanup occurs, not only on the subject property but on any property affected by the same source of contamination; and 2) to make it possible for the current residents of the area benefit from the project. That is, cleanup and reuse shouldn’t trigger displacement of the people who have suffered historical exposure to contamination. - LS]

Turning Brownfields Into Hospitals Can Improve Public Health. It Can Also Entrench Disparities.
Healthfields may offer badly needed health services, but they risk re-entrenching health disparities stemming from historic segregation, environmental racism and waste colonialism.

By SHILOH KRUPAR   
Next City
JULY 17, 2023

In this excerpt from “Health Colonialism,” geographer Shiloh Krupar examines the role of urban brownfields in health disparities and medical apartheid.

In the early 1990s, big-city mayors and legislators from urban industrial states pressured Congress and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to start a pilot program to redevelop underutilized and damaged land in highly desirable urban infill areas.

These brownfields, often cheaper than comparable nonpolluted properties, became sites of promise for reusing a struggling city’s vacant or depleted land — as a “green investment” to conserve unused land by redeveloping brownfields.

A form of brownfield project called healthfields reframes land revitalization as an ongoing public health effort involving community stewardship of bodies of land and human health. This land reuse policy seeks to remedy medical scarcity in underserved BIPOC communities and close the biomedical divide that separates bodily health and clinic-based acute care from environmental conditions.


…

For the entire article/excerpt, see
https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/turning-brownfields-into-hospitals-can-improve-public-health.-it-can-also-e

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)

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