By Shiloh Krupar, Photo: Andy Vult/Unsplash, 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.
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