BOOK
Shiloh Krupar, 2023, Health Colonialism: Urban Wastelands and Hospital Frontiers (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, Forerunners series)
Health Colonialism discusses three policy fields that support hospital land development projects, and queries their relationship to health colonialism. The book investigates the racially inequitable effects of elite U.S. hospitals on their surrounding neighborhoods, and their role in perpetuating a frontier of contaminated or underutilized land parcels primed for redevelopment. Naming this frontier medical brownfields and tracking its consolidation and transnational extension, the book shows how hospitals leverage their domestic real estate empires to underwrite international prospecting for patients and overseas services and specialty clinics—from Las Vegas to Abu Dhabi—in the process tethering hospital prestige to the reproduction of domestic blight and to the stratification of medical elites. Drawing on the anticolonial work of Frantz Fanon, Health Colonialism insists that “decolonial” efforts in global health must scrutinize the land practices of medical institutions within the context of a global color line and reckon with the ways that the Western biomedical model stems from the liberal tradition that perpetuates divisions of humanity.
REVIEWS
Kristie Serota, review of Health Colonialism: Urban Wastelands and Hospital Frontiers, British Medical Journal – Medical Humanities, July 6, 2023
“Throughout the book, the author explores how biomedical logic works to create a chasm separating biomedicine and technology from broader geographical and social contexts, including ecology, culture, politics, and local economies. Companies, governments, and financial structures enact frontier logic and participate in land grabs, claiming land they deem underutilized, contaminated, etc., and redeveloping it for the ‘good of the community.’ Meanwhile, neoliberal market logic promotes individual social responsibility, obfuscating the perpetuation of racist, colonial relations internationally and locally. This book engages cross-disciplinary audiences, including geographers, public health advocates and scholars, urban planners, disability justice advocates, critical bioethicists, and those interested in conducting critical political economic analyses. Health Colonialism inspires readers to walk around their hometowns with a new theoretical lens that allows them to view their local environments through the lens of contemporary colonial expansion.”
Kristie Serota is a PhD Candidate studying Social and Behavioral Health Sciences at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
FEATURED / HIGHLIGHTED IN
Featured Op-Ed: “Turning Brownfields Into Hospitals Can Improve Public Health. It Can Also Entrench Disparities,” Next City, July 17, 2023, https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/turning-brownfields-into-hospitals-can-improve-public-health.-it-can-also-e
Work highlighted in: Bloomberg CityLab Daily “What We’re Reading” section, July 19, 2023, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-18/citylab-daily-pandemic-era-bikeshare-boom-remains-strong
Featured in: Diana Ionescu, “The Double-Edged Sword of ‘Healthfields,’” Planetizen, July 19, 2023, https://www.planetizen.com/news/2023/07/124758-double-edged-sword-healthfields