posted by in 03/28 — Leave a comment
28
Mar 14

Planned Shrinkage

After reading the paper for this week, it doesn’t seem to make sense why the city would reduce fire-control in areas that would statistically have more fires. Normally, these weird instances of pulling plugs and cutting support from people who need them is a matter of saving money. But here, cutting off the amount of fire departments available to control fires is a matter of life and death in some cases. However, once we establish that this is a “planned shrinkage,” and that the effects of reducing services in low-income areas was intentional, we see that the reason was in indeed disperse low-income populations.

Referring to Cameron’s flow-chart, I wonder if getting rid of AIDS dense areas was part of the plan as well or if it was just a consequence of dispersing low-income areas. Either way, the problem worsened and the spread of AIDS became harder to control.

posted by in 03/28 / R&R / Uncategorized — Leave a comment
28
Mar 14

Intricate connections

I really enjoyed this paper (except for the statistics, which I honestly did not even try to understand). I found its conclusions to be more complex than usual because they involved many factor, and therefore more realistic and interesting. Don’t get me wrong–it was disheartening as hell. But at least the phenomena Wallace is describing are complicated & multifaceted enough to reflect reality. There are one main causal chains that I picked out of the reading:

overcrowding + (evil) reduction in fire service => population dispersal/relocation => dispersal of intravenous drug using population (population with highest HIV/AIDS rates and transmission potential) => more widespread HIV/AIDS => more difficulty in creating effective HIV/AIDS prevention programs

This, to me, is the point of public health as a social science. We can pretty much guess that such important factors like housing quality & availability will have an effect on people’s physical health, but articles like this explain what exactly the effect is and clearly illustrate its cause-and-effect relationships. That said, I think the ideas Wallace presented here were somewhat limited by the “paper” format because all the interconnected ideas had to be split up on different pages. The timeline, specifically, could have been laid out more clearly (I think) even in the paper format. Y’all will hear more about that later this morning.

posted by in 03/28 — Leave a comment
28
Mar 14

Pure Wrong

As I went through the reading this week, I couldn’t help but think about Professor Braine’s comments when she posted the reading- that this is one of the rare cases where evil intent seems to be involved. While many damaging policies have been put into place over the years, for most of them, one can argue that they were not made with bad intent, bad rather error of judgement. In the case of planned shrinkage, on the other hand, is is very difficult to see any motives behind these actions besides for hurting a particular segment of the population.

Josh Setton

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →