Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana [electronic resource].

Forensic Architecture Goldsmiths, University of London 2021

Open access content

In the US state of Louisiana, along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a heavily industrialised ‘Petrochemical Corridor’ overlays a territory formerly known as ‘Plantation Country’. When slavery was abolished in 1865, more than five hundred sugarcane plantations lined both sides of the lower Mississippi River; today, more than two hundred of those sites are occupied by some of the United States’ most polluting petrochemical facilities. Residents of the majority-Black ‘fenceline’ communities that border those facilities breathe some of the most toxic air in the country and suffer some of the highest rates of cancer, along with a wide variety of other serious health ailments. They call their homeland ‘Death Alley’. Here, environmental degradation and cancer risk manifest as the by-products of colonialism and slavery. Sugarcane was historically the most dangerous crop to cultivate. To accommodate a negative demographic growth rate among the enslaved population, each plantation established at least one, and sometimes as many as three cemeteries for its enslaved population. The majority of these burial grounds were omitted from historical maps. Over the decades, all outward traces of many of these cemeteries have been erased. On rare occasions, cemeteries resurface – when petrochemical corporations break ground on new construction sites. In 2015, two cemeteries were uncovered during a survey for a proposed expansion of a refinery owned by Shell Oil Company. Four years later, four more cemeteries were located during the early stages of the construction of a new facility by the company Formosa Plastics. How might we recover the memory of the hundreds, if not thousands, of missing cemeteries at risk of desecration? Together with fenceline community activist group RISE St. James, Forensic Architecture (FA) has developed a method to help locate these cemeteries in support of longstanding local efforts to protect ancestral sites and demands for a morato
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Space (Architecture)
Cartography
Imperialism
Ecology
Racism
Remote-sensing images
Violence

Text

Forensic Architecture
Imani Jacqueline Brown
Samaneh Moafi
Dimitra Andritsou
Olukoye Akinkugbe
Omar Ferwati
Ariel Caine
Sam Blair
Eyal Weizman
Kishan San
Nicholas Masterton
Nour Abuzaid
Sanjana Varghese
Ayana Enomoto-Hurst
Ana Lopez Sanchez-Vegazo
Caterina Selva
Jacob Bertilsson
Robert Trafford
Elizabeth Breiner
Sarah Nankivell
Salvador Navarro-Martinez