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Title
Segregating circulation in urban landmarks of colonial health, a spatial lecture of three post-war hospitals in Belgian-Congo. |
Full text
https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8558959; http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-8558959 |
Date
2017 |
Author(s)
De Nys-Ketels, Simon |
Abstract
Segregation and public healthcare were closely intertwined in African colonial society. During the interbellum, medical knowledge was widely used to undergird the implementation of racially segregated cities, pathologizing the African body and neighbourhoods. In Belgian Congo, within the logics of this 'sanitation syndrome', hospitals for Europeans and Congolese were neatly separated, located in different buildings and in different parts of town. However, after WWII and in the face of an increasingly critical international community, the development of a socio-economic Plan Décennal that explicitly promoted the welfare of the Congolese marked a disputed but steady shift towards more egalitarian colonial politics. In Belgian Congo's largest cities, this plan foresaw the construction of new and architecturally ambitious hospitals, which quickly sparked a debate on whether or not to keep healthcare infrastructure segregated. Local city boards often advocated to separate infrastructure, whereas the Service d'Hygiène called for a politique de rapprochement. Although the medical service had, during the interbellum, strongly called for segregated cities and hospitals, they were now arguing to juxtapose and join hospitals for Congolese and Europeans for reasons of economic efficiency. In this research, I discuss three of these urban hospital projects, the Hôpital des Congolais in Kinshasa, the Hôpital des Congolais in Lubumbashi, and the Complexe Hospitalier in Bukavu. Although the intricate relation between segregation and public healthcare has been extensively studied in academic literature, I argue that a spatial analysis of healthcare infrastructure allows a more fine-grained understanding of how public healthcare, medicine and urban segregation remain interwoven during the post-war period, albeit in a less straightforward way. In particular, I focus on circulation patterns for European doctors and African staff, patients and visitors to scrutinize this relation. Although both in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, the new hospitals for Europeans and Africans were never juxtaposed, due to either the local city board or the spatial lay-out of the city, the circulation trajectories reveal quite a different approach in the two designs. In Kinshasa, the architects used circulation diagrams depicting segregated circulation routes to pitch the project to the responsible government officials, whereas in Lubumbashi, the hospital for Congolese allowed easy access to African citizens rather than to European doctors. In Bukavu, the new hospital infrastructure was designed as a single complex comprised of two wings for respectively malades de standing de vie élevée, and de standing peu élevée. Here, the rational circulation patterns suggest a design approach driven more by economic efficiency than by motives of racial segregation. The analysis of circulation patterns in these three landmark hospitals sheds light on different design approaches in three different urban contexts. This shows that, in the 1950s, how and if to segregate urban healthcare infrastructure remained heavily debated questions without clear-cut answers. It also reveals that a spatial perspective is crucial in fully understanding the changed and various ways in which public healthcare and segregation continued to be closely intertwined during the post-war period. |
Type of publication
conference; info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceObject; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion |
Repository
Gent - University of Gent
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Added to C-A: 2019-01-29;14:44:33 |
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