Health and the Urban Environment

Kristin Brig-Ortiz, "Crafting Uneven Waterscapes: The Well, the Tank, and the Racialized Contestation of Early Water Infrastructure in Colonial Durban, 1854-1898"
 
Abstract: From its founding in 1824, the colonial port town of Durban depended on this standalone provisional water infrastructure to maintain healthy and productive urban environments that enabled imperial control in a crucial area of the southern African coast. Following its municipal incorporation in 1854, the town took control of and built on the existing spiderwebbed networks of wells and tanks to maintain a clean water supply until the introduction of piped water. By reading archival sources against the grain, this article argues that as Durban grew in size and racial make-up during the mid-nineteenth century, the municipality paid increasing attention to the state of its standalone provisional water supply system and the public health threats it generated, implementing racialized restrictions and policies around wells and tanks that depended on the blurred lines between public and private technologies. Although scholars have investigated the construction and use of piped waterworks in colonial sites, few have explored the importance of autonomous infrastructure and its persistence in the urban environment even after piped infrastructure is implemented, particularly in significant British imperial port town like Durban. Examining urban relationships to autonomous infrastructures like wells and tanks demonstrates that water infrastructures in the early urbanized colonial landscape led to the uneven water supply landscape of South African cities, exposing how racial capitalistic logic and social norming influenced who received access to water supplies and the kinds of technologies available to them.

Joanna Paxton Federico, "Finding the Center(s): Insitutionalizing the Science of Violence Prevention at the CDC (1977-1992)
 
Abstract: My dissertation examines the emergence of violence as an object of public health knowledge at the CDC in the late twentieth century. In 1977, amid an international movement to rationalize public health through an emphasis on prevention (rather than cure), Center for Disease Control director William Foege undertook a major reorganization of the agency. After surveying hundreds of public health experts about the nation’s most pressing preventable health concerns, he developed a new model of several Centers for Disease Control, each focused on a particular cluster of related health risks. Violence, which had only recently been subjected to epidemiologic study, was not a priority for survey respondents initially. Foege nevertheless insisted that the data showed violence was a major and growing cause of preventable premature death and it should therefore be a priority for the CDC. Over the next few years, many of Foege’s advisors came to agree. Yet, exactly where to place violence-related programs within the CDC remained unclear. Did it fit best in the Center for Health Promotion and Education alongside smoking prevention, nutrition, and family planning? In the Center for Environmental Health with chemical exposure programs and accident prevention? Should workplace injury and violence really be siloed in the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH)? This chapter traces the intersecting epistemological, structural, and social forces at play in violence prevention’s moves through various Centers and considers their effects on the trajectory of the science.