January 15ths (Disaster Aftermaths)

1/15/2010

Haiti Day 4. This is the first disaster that I recall that is so suffused in social media. With YouTube and blogs, you get to reflect longer. Interesting while watching the videos: people walking aimlessly, almost every structure damaged or destroyed, even those that are apparently well-constructed—corpses being scooped by heavy equipment into dump trucks and hauled to a so-called ‘mass grave’, but it’s just a trash dump or land-fill, with old appliances, furniture, and other trash, the bodies all anonymous and unaccounted for. (You watch the video, and you realize that the journalists there survive on denial or black humor). “Convening with the dead is what allows Haitians to link themselves, directly by bloodline, to a pre-slave past,” said Ira Lowenthal, an anthropologist who has lived in Haiti for 38 years. He added that with so many bodies denied rest in family burial plots, where many rituals take place, countless spiritual connections would be severed. “It is a violation of everything these people hold dear...” 

Chris Hondros/Getty Images: “A truck dumped rubble Saturday into a mass grave in Titanyen, a village on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.” (Interesting: the caption reads ‘dumping rubble’. While there apparently is rubble there, you can see dead bodies. The caption was composed in deference to the dead. It could not be that as they carry away the debris they are not first removing the people!!) 

This is a jolt for everyone: it forces you to think of necessity, usefulness, common good.  

What were the political impacts of the Haiti earthquake in 2010?      

1/15/2023

Stopped at the CCC: Chicago Fire panoramas.

[Chicago is the prime example of how a city can rebuild after a fire. But there aren't many Burnhams around anymore. Anyone in that capacity is more of an F.T. Marinetti].

1/15/2025

On the rebuilding in the burned areas: density, multi-family, revisit Chris Alexander's A Pattern Language, fire berms/levees/ecotones which artists and architects can collaborate on. Very often there's good old ideas that were simply forgotten about.