Honolulu’s colonial legacy of marginalization: A cycle of emergency and urban development

Relying heavily on newspaper archives, this article explores the ‘first rough draft’ of Honolulu’s early urban frontier to rescue the spectacle of environmental and emergency management in the early twentieth-century town of Kakaako. Analysing the interdependent discursive and material processes in response to public health crisis ‐ viewed here serving as a continuation of colonialism ‐ I show how Kakaako existed as a release valve for detritus as part of a dialectical process towards development. Spaces like Kakaako proved central to the partitioning of urban space, serving as receptacles of bio-sociocultural waste. This article details how cycles of emergency cordoned-off spaces utilized to contain, discipline or assimilate certain groups, provoking the development and evacuation of that which is judged as unfit and unworthy while engendering the notion of profitability as a necessary precondition to inhabiting city space.