Februar 18, 2016, 12:24 p.m.,
Risse, G. B.,
Allgemein.
Based primarily on personal experiences, this article aims to illustrate the troublesome relationship between the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and its adjoining neighborhoods from the 1960s to the present. Like other University of California campuses, UCSF was not required to conform to local land uses and zoning laws. Only its periodic and mandatory Long Range Development Plans provided clues about future research initiatives and expansion plans. The story, punctuated by indifference to neighborhood concerns, depicts the protracted legal wrangling between a world-renowned medical institution and local civic organizations fearful of its impact on the environment, residential life, and real estate. The featured focus of these disputes centered around UCSF’s hasty purchase in 1984 of a large facility located in the Laurel Heights neighborhood of San Francisco to alleviate crowding at the main campus on Parnassus Heights. Confusion, misunderstanding, and outright distrust concerning UCSF’s planning for the new research location ensued. In fact, fear of potential chemical emissions and radioactive contamination prompted stiff local resistance. Eventually, after a decade of litigation, the protracted case forced UCSF to redefine and restrict its mission at Laurel Heights. The article argues that the Medical Center’s subsequent leadership learned an important lesson from this costly lawsuit. In its subsequent efforts to expand locally, UCSF created mechanisms designed to prevent opposition and litigation by systematically engaging with San Francisco communities and their leaders. By the early twenty-first century, such partnerships and alliances paved the way for a successful institutional expansion, thus consolidating UCSF’s role as a leader in biomedical research, teaching, and practice.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/2/346?rss=1
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Februar 18, 2016, 12:24 p.m.,
Sloan, K. A.,
Allgemein.
Poised on the cusp of the twentieth century, many urban citizens believed their societies to be sickened by suicide epidemics. It was assumed that rapid modernization and technological advance caused some individuals to develop nervous conditions that negated their impulses for self-preservation. Although statistical evidence pointed to higher rates of suicide among adult men, society believed that youth and women were most vulnerable to the epidemic. This article examines cases of young women carefully planning their suicides in symbolic spaces of Mexico City. It argues that public suicides made self-conscious decisions on how they would die, in particular choosing the sites of their deaths for their cultural meanings. How society viewed their deaths depended upon their virtue in life; nevertheless, Mexicans perpetuated their culture of commemorating the dead by erecting ephemeral memorials at the sites of death.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/2/396?rss=1
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Februar 18, 2016, 12:24 p.m.,
Rosner, D., Markowitz, G.,
Allgemein.
One of the most troubling urban health issues is childhood poisoning caused by lead, the widespread environmental toxin. It is in old plumbing fixtures, solder, paint and other building materials in huge quantities. Despite decades of improvements in blood lead levels among America’s children, the continuing presence of lead on the walls of the nation’s older houses and the known neurological effects of low-level exposures presents a classic problem: in light of the enormous costs of detoxifying the nation’s housing, should society remove this toxin in order to prevent future impacts on IQ, attention deficits disorders, and possibly criminal behavior, or do we remove some of the most pernicious sources, such as window sashes and chipped paint to reduce, not eliminate, the risk to children? Throughout the 1970s and 1980s this issue emerged among public health advocates, HUD officials and housing reformers, and community organizers and activists. Who should bear the responsibility for polluted housing: Industry, housing officials, public health officials, landlords or tenants? The battles began during the 1960s and continue to today. In 2001 the high court in Maryland condemned studies conducted by Johns Hopkins researchers that sought to develop methods for the partial remediation of homes, saying they were akin to Nazi human experiments in which children were used as human guinea pigs. This article traces the evolving debate over responsibility for the public health consequences of polluted housing.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/2/323?rss=1
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Februar 18, 2016, 12:24 p.m.,
McClendon, M. C.,
Allgemein.
This essay examines a work stoppage that was planned by Norwich’s worsted weaver apprentices in 1610, but that never took place. In depositions taken after the plot was revealed, the apprentices told local authorities that their aim in leaving their work was to call attention to the problem of laborers in the industry that had not served apprenticeships, but were nevertheless hired to work as journeymen. This dramatic and unusual action that the apprentices took was the result of a confluence of particular circumstances in early Stuart Norwich. The combination of a difficult local economy, the impact of nonapprenticed laborers on their future prospects, and the eruption of plague in 1609-1610 drove the apprentices to imagine and try to create a new role for themselves in the weaving trade and in urban society. Their efforts, although ineffective, nevertheless reveal the imaginable limits of social politics between apprentices and their masters.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/2/363?rss=1
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Februar 18, 2016, 12:24 p.m.,
Simpson, A. T.,
Allgemein.
In 1990, Mayor Sophie Masloff warned large not-for-profits, like the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), that unless they started making an increased financial contribution in the form of payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, the City of Pittsburgh would take them to court to recoup what municipal officials perceived to be their "fair share" of the local tax pie. Masloff’s threat represented only one potential strategy employed by city officials since the late 1960s to address the growing imbalance of power between large not-for-profit employers and local government. This study uses the debate over PILOTs, and the 1997 passage of the Insitutions of Purely Public Charity Act, or Act 55, to examine the changing role of large not-for-profits in the City of Pittsburgh from the late 1960s to the present. It argues that more attention must be paid to the emergence of large not-for-profits, especially hospital systems, as major economic actors and as a focal point for Pittsburgh’s current reinvention narrative. This decision has had real financial consequences for the city’s revenue collection stream. It has also placed elected officials into an uncomfortable role as an arbiter between sometimes-warring parties, as the growing rift between the large health care not-for-profits UPMC and Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield has dramatically illumined. A more careful consideration of the role of large not-for-profits allows historians and policymakers to better understand the financial consequences of the "eds and meds" economy for the postindustrial American city.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/2/306?rss=1
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Februar 18, 2016, 12:24 p.m.,
Edwards, E.,
Allgemein.
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Februar 18, 2016, 12:24 p.m.,
Conner, C. A.,
Allgemein.
In Birmingham, Alabama, in 1987, a white conservative movement arose in opposition to build a new healthcare clinic in downtown through the use of eminent domain. Critics claimed the Kirklin Clinic reflected urban corruption and the privatization of the public sphere. Municipal officials and white economic elites argued that the clinic secured the city’s economic transition from industrialization to healthcare. The clinic, however, was the manifestation of a twenty-year campaign to privatize healthcare services in a public university as well as the result of market shifts in healthcare disbursement policies. Neoliberal governance guided this urban economic development project. The controversy over the clinic reveals the ideological and class tensions among metropolitan whites, as well as conservatives’ demands for their inclusion and the recognition of their rights by the municipal government.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/2/284?rss=1
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Februar 18, 2016, 12:24 p.m.,
Beaven, B., Griffiths, J.,
Allgemein.
This article explores how the meaning of Empire Day in the British World was manipulated and transformed through a range of urban institutions before reaching the public at large. Selecting cities in England and the Antipodean colonies for comparison, we shall challenge the assumption that a hegemonic imperial ideology was streamed uncontested and unaltered to urban populations. Indeed, it is argued here that because of significant differences in urban development in Britain and colonial towns, the meaning of the imperial message was variable. In the British context imperial meaning was directed to cure perceived local crises while, alternatively, within a colonial setting imperial propaganda came secondary to national priorities. The conclusion is that, in the case of Empire Day, the urban setting is decisive to understanding how imperial propaganda was transformed to meet the needs of local or national environments. Key differences in the way civic culture and the provincial press evolved in Britain and her colonies ensured that Lord Meath’s desire that Empire Day would nurture a unifying and homogenous imperial identity proved an elusive aspiration.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/2/377?rss=1
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Februar 18, 2016, 12:24 p.m.,
McKee, G. A.,
Allgemein.
Many leading hospitals and medical centers in the United States are located in large urban centers. This has meant that the post–World War II growth of the U.S. health care sector has been deeply intertwined with wider changes in the political economy of American cities. Through an examination of Boston’s Tufts-New England Medical Center (T-NEMC) and the surrounding Chinatown neighborhood, this article explores the implications of this relationship by assessing the spatial, economic, and community consequences of the growth of a major urban academic medical center. It treats the history of health care and health care policy as a key part of urban history, using the T-NEMC case to tell a larger story about the role of local and federal policy in transforming urban health care institutions.. T-NEMC deployed federal urban renewal and hospital construction programs to finance an ambitious expansion program designed to allow it to compete with Boston’s many prestigious medical centers. T-NEMC faced determined opposition from Chinatown residents who forged political alliances that helped them gain concessions from the medical center, including housing, schools, and health care and community centers—even as their neighborhood was transformed. Ultimately, T-NEMC’s larger strategy proved problematic. It took on excessive debt during the period of its expansion and then, in the 1990s, failed to form critical network alliances with other hospitals. The story of health care redevelopment in Boston thus proves to be deeply enmeshed in the changing political economy—and politics—of health care in the United States.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/2/259?rss=1
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Februar 18, 2016, 12:24 p.m.,
Elkins, A.,
Allgemein.
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