Place matters: Mortality, space, and urban form in the 2003 Paris heat wave disaster

French Historical Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 299-330

  Keller, Richard C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84877641367     PISSN: 00161071     EISSN: 15275493     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00161071-1960682     Document Type: Article

References (112)

1. See Stephanie Vandentorren et al., "Données météorologiques et enquêtes sur la mortalité dans 13 grandes villes françaises", Bulletin épidémiologique hebdomadaire 45-46(2003):219-20;
2. and Vandentorren et al., "Mortality in Thirteen French Cities during the August 2003 Heat Wave", American Journal of Public Health 94, no. 9(2004):1518-20.
3. "Excess mortality" is a blunt but commonly accepted measurement for disaster-related mortality. It is calculated by subtracting the average mortality for a given period (in this case, Aug. 1-20, 2000-2002) from the observed mortality in the event of the disaster (Aug. 1-20, 2003). For more on the measurement of mortality during the disaster, see Carine Vassy, Richard C. Keller, and Robert Dingwall, Enregistrer les morts, identifier les surmortalités: Une comparaison Angleterre, Etats-Unis et France (Rennes, 2010).
4. Pierre Bourdieu, "Effets de lieu", in Le misère du monde, ed. Pierre Bourdieu et al. (Paris, 1993), 159-60.
5. For a few examples of the qualitative study of disaster and vulnerability, see Jeffrey H. Jackson, Paris under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (London, 2010);
6. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: The El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London, 2002);
7. Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York, 1999);
8. Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York, 2000);
9. Steinberg, "The Secret History of Natural Disaster", Environmental Hazards 3, no. 1(2001):31-35;
10. and Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford, 1981).
11. Historians have advocated a return to the local for decades. Among other works, see Richard Cobb, Peoples and Places (New York, 1985);
12. and Alain Corbin, A Village of Cannibals, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1993).
13. More recent efforts to situate the local within a wider globalism include Gregory Mann, "Locating Colonial Histories: Between France and West Africa", American Historical Review 110, no. 2(2005):409-34;
14. and Mrinalini Sinha, "Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India", Journal of British Studies 40, no. 4(2001):489-521.
15. See Eloi Laurent, "Bleu, Blanc... Green? France and Climate Change", French Politics, Culture, and Society 27, no. 2(2009):142-53;
16. Catherine Le Grand-Sébille and Anne Véga, Pour une autre mémoire de la canicule: Professionnels de funéraire, des chambres mortuaires et familles témoignent (Paris, 2005);
17. and Martine Bungener, "Canicule estivale: La triple vulnérabilité des personnes âgées", Mouvements 32, no. 2(2004):75-82.
18. Inathèque: TF1, 20 heures (Aug. 2, 2003).
19. Inathèque: France 2, 20 heures-le journal (Aug. 9, 2003).
20. Denis Hémon and Eric Jougla, Surmortalité liée à la canicule d'août 2003-rapport d'étape (Paris, 2003), 30.
21. Some of the many treatments of the "forgotten" in the media include "Nous devrions avoir honte", Le Parisien, Aug. 26, 2003, www.leparisien. fr/une/nous-devrions-tous-avoir-honte-26-08-2003-2004338638.php;
22. "A ses morts oubliés, la patrie repentante", Libération, Sept. 4, 2003, www.liberation. fr/societe/0101453167-a-ses- morts-oublies-la-patrie-repentante;
23. "Barbarie française", Le Figaro, Aug. 25, 2003, recherche.lefigaro.fr/recherche/access/lefigaro-fr.php?archive= BszTm8dCk78Jk8uwiNq9T8CoS9GECSHiKEu2xvmpVRV39d2PUFbXIqvpYVZXchz18RKqJ7hofQuZy6 BaSOXVcw%3D%3D;
24. On the daily distribution of deaths during the heat wave, see Hémon and Jougla, Surmortalité, 29.
25. See Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques, www.insee.fr/fr/bases-de-donnees/default.asp?page= statistiques-locales/chiffres-cles.htm (accessed Mar. 30, 2012).
26. On the problem of insecurity and disproportionate policing in Seine-Saint-Denis, see Didier Fassin, Force de l'ordre: Une anthropologie de la police des quartiers (Paris, 2011);
27. and Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Oxford, 2008).
28. Alain Le Tertre et al., "Impact of the 2003 Heat Wave on All-Cause Mortality in Nine French Cities", Epidemiology 17, no. 1(2006):75-79;
29. and Françoise Lalande et al., "Mission d'expertise et d'évaluation du système de santé pendant la canicule 2003" (unpublished report, 2003).
30. See, e.g., Institut de Veille Sanitaire, Etude des facteurs de risque de décès des personnes âgées résidant à domicile durant la vague de chaleur d'août 2003 (Paris, 2004);
31. and Joël Belmin, "Les conséquences de la vague de chaleur d'août 2003 sur la mortalité des personnes âgées: Un premier bilan", La presse médicale 32, no. 34(2003):1591-94.
32. See "Excess Deaths during the August 2003 Heat Wave in Paris, France", Revue d'epidémiologie et de santé publique 54, no. 2(2005):127-35.
33. Agency, "Heat Island Effect", www.epa.gov/heatisld/index.html.
34. For links between the heat island effect and heat waves in France in particular, see Clément Champiat, "Identifier les îlots de chaleur urbains pour réduire l'impact sanitaire des vagues de chaleur", Environnement, risques et santé 8, no. 5(2009):399-411.
35. For the eighteenth century, for example, see Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (Hamburg, 1781);
36. for urban pathology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Gregg Mitman, "In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History", Environmental History 10, no. 2(2005):184-210;
37. Charles Rosenberg, "Pathologies of Progress: The Idea of Civilization as Risk", Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72, no. 4(1998):714-30;
38. and Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago, 1992).
39. For examples of urban social pathology in mid-twentieth-century France and the United States, see Haut Comité Consultatif de la Population et de la Famille, Politique de la vieillesse: Rapport de la Commission d'étude des problèmes de la vieillesse (Paris, 1962), which attributes the increasing isolation of the elderly in France to the egoism and alienation of urban life;
40. and Stanley Milgram, "The Experience of Living in Cities", Science, no. 3924(1970):1461-68.
41. Karen E. Smoyer, "Putting Risk in Its Place: Methodological Considerations for Investigating Extreme Event Health Risk", Social Science and Medicine 47, no. 11(1998):1809-24.
42. Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago, 2002).
43. Canouï-Poitrine, Cadot, and Spira, "Excess Deaths"; see also Emmanuelle Cadot and Alfred Spira, "Canicule et surmortalité à Paris en août 2003, le poid des facteurs socio- économiques", Espaces, populations, sociétés, nos. 2-3(2006):239-49.
44. See Matthew Gandy, "The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space", Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n. s., 24, no. 1(1999):23-44.
45. Louis-René Villermé, "De la mortalité dans les divers quartiers de la ville de Paris", Annales d'hygiène publique et de médecine légale 3(1830):294-341;
46. cf. Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY, 2000);
47. David Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA, 1995);
48. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Baltimore, MD, 2006);
49. Alain Corbin, Le miasme et la jonquille (Paris, 1982);
50. William Coleman, Death Is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France (Madison, WI, 1982).
51. Cole, Power of Large Numbers.
52. Coleman, Death Is a Social Disease.
53. See Barnes, Great Stink of Paris, 50;
54. and Anthony Sutcliffe, The Autumn of Central Paris: The Defeat of Town Planning, 1850-1970 (London, 1970), 102-3.
55. See also David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York, 1995), esp. 48, 96-97, 270-74;
56. and David Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, NJ, 1958), 30-31.
57. Jordan, Transforming Paris;
58. David P. Jordan, "Haussmann and Haussmannisation: The Legacy for Paris", French Historical Studies 27, no. 1(2004):87-113;
59. Pinkney, Napoleon III;
60. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, NJ, 1985);
61. Jeanne Gaillard, Paris, la ville (1852-1870) (Paris, 1977);
62. David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore, MD, 1985);
63. André Morizet, Du vieux Paris au Paris moderne (Paris, 1932).
64. Gandy, "Paris Sewers", 24, 35.
65. Clark, Painting of Modern Life.
66. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982).
67. See Tyler Stovall, The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (Berkeley, CA, 1990);
68. Stovall, "From Red Belt to Black Belt: Race, Class, and Urban Marginality in Twentieth-Century Paris", in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Durham, NC, 2003), 351-70;
69. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air;
70. and Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, 1991).
71. For an account of what life might have been like in such a building before Haussmann's time, melding labor and domestic life, see Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power, and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris, trans. Carole Shelton (Cambridge, MA, 1993), esp. 9-21.
72. Ann-Louise Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850-1902 (Madison, WI, 1985);
73. and Sutcliffe, Autumn of Central Paris.
74. Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris.
75. See, e.g., Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (New York, 1982);
76. Philippe Bourgois, "Missing the Holocaust: My Father's Account of Auschwitz from August 1943 to June 1944", Anthropological Quarterly 78, no. 1(2005):89-123;
77. Stephen Fredman, "'How to Get out of the Room That Is the Book?': Paul Auster and the Consequences of Confinement", Postmodern Culture 6, no. 3(1996), muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern-culture/v006/6.3fredman. html;
78. Christine Coffman, "The Papin Enigma", GLQ 5, no. 3(1999):331-59;
79. and Kristin Ross, "Schoolteachers, Maids, and Other Paranoid Histories", Yale French Studies, no. 91(1997):7-27. For a contemporary glimpse into living conditions in such rooms, see the documentary film Chambre de bonne, directed by Maija-Lene Rettig (2002); far more problematic is the recent comedy Les femmes du 6e étage, directed by Philippe Le Guay (2011), which trivializes power relations between a bourgeois in the sixteenth arrondissement and his domestic servant, who lives in a chambre de bonne.
80. see "Zones of Indistinction: Bio-political Contestations in the Urban Arena", Cultural Geographies 13, no. 4(2006):497-516;
81. "Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City", International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 1(2005):26-49;
82. and "The Ecological Facades of Patrick Blanc", Architectural Design 80, no. 3(2010):28-33.
83. See esp. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York, 1981);
84. also, with regard to sovereignty and territoriality, see "Governmentality", trans. Rosi Braidotti and rev.
85. Colin Gordon, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago, 1991), 87-104.
86. Institut de Veille Sanitaire, Etude des facteurs de risque.
87. Tonino Serafini, "Une ville étranglée par la crise du logement", Libération, Sept. 11, 2007, www.liberation. fr/societe/0101110564-une-ville-etranglee-par-la-crise-du-logement.
88. Amélia Blanchot, "Pour une chambre de 12 m2, 40 candidats dans l'escalier", Libération, Sept. 20, 2007, www.liberation.fr/ evenement/0101111290-pour-une-chambre-de-12-m2-40-candidats-dans-l-escalier;
89. Keren Lentschner, "Avis de pénurie sur le marché des chambres de bonne", Le Figaro, Apr. 9, 2007, www.lefigaro.fr/economie/2007/ 04/09/04001-20070409ARTFIG90210-avis-de-penurie-sur-le-marche-des-chambres-de- bonne.php;
90. Laure Equy, "Sous la douche, je pense à l'endroit où je vais dormir", Libération, Jan. 22, 2008, www.liberation. fr/vous/010172316-sous-la-douche-je-pense-a-l-endroit-ou-je-vais-dormir.
91. Simone de Beauvoir, La vieillesse (Paris, 1970), 254-55.
92. See Lepault and Aibar, Les oubliés de la canicule;
93. also Raphaël Chamak, Alexandre Garcia, and Cécile Prieur, "Ces vieillards morts dans l'oubli à Paris lors de la canicule", Le monde, Sept. 4, 2003, www.lemonde.fr/cgi-bin/ACHATS/acheter. cgi?offre=ARCHIVES&type-item=ART-ARCH-30J&objet-id=817320&xtmc= chamak-garcia&xtcr=1.
94. Serafini, "Les mal-logés" and "Encore à la rue", Libération, Nov. 1, 2007, www.liberation. fr/instantane/ 0101114268-encore-a-la-rue.
95. Louis Henry and Maurice Febvay, "La situation du logement dans la région parisienne", Population 12, no. 1(1957):129-40;
96. Yankel Fijalkow, "Surpopulation ou insalubrité: Deux statistiques pour décrire l'habitat populaire (1880-1914)", Le mouvement social, no. 182(1998):79-96.
97. Ross, "Schoolteachers";
98. Coffman, "Papin Enigma"
99. Karl Laske, "Un enfant sans papiers fuit la police et chute du 4e étage", Libération, Aug. 10, 2007, www.liberation. fr/societe/0101108781-un-enfant-sans-papiers-fuit-la-police-et-chute-du-4e - etage;
100. Laske, "Le saut dans le désespoir des sans papiers traqués", Libération, Sept. 21, 2007, www.liberation. fr/societe/0101111364-le-saut-dans-le-desespoir-des-sans-papiers-traques.
101. See, e.g., Jackson, Paris under Water;
102. Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (New York, 2006);
103. and Ronald J. Daniels, Donald F. Kettl, and Howard Kunreuther, On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina (Philadelphia, 2006).
104. On hurricanes, see Steinberg, Acts of God.
105. Steinberg, "Secret History of Natural Disaster";
106. Davis, Ecology of Fear.
107. See also Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community (New York, 1994);
108. and Kim Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (Chicago, 2001).
109. Susan L. Cutter, Bryan J. Boruff, and W. Lynn Shirley, "Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards", Social Science Quarterly 84, no. 2(2003):242-61.
110. Giovanna Di Chiro, "Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice", in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, 1995), 298-320.
111. Jonas Ebbeson, ed., Access to Justice in Environmental Matters in the EU (The Hague, 2002);
112. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York, 2000).