Toward Camden

In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city's vacant lots withhold. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

EVALUATION OF FOREST FIRES IN PARANÁ IN 2018 AND 2019

Forest fires represent significant environmental, economic, and social damage in many countries. Historical knowledge of their characteristics aids in making preventive decisions, as well as fighting forest fires. However, the general data of fires in Paraná are outdated. The objective of this study was to evaluate the forest fires in the state of Paraná in 2018 and 2019, surveying the following information: municipality and region affected; month and day of occurrence; and vegetation type. To this end, data obtained from the Paraná Fire Department through the SysBMNew-CCB platform were analyzed. The fire density by region was verified and compared through cluster analysis. Compared to the previous year, 2019 showed a 42.25% increase in the number of fires. In both years, most forest fires occurred in the North-central region, followed by the Metropolitan Region of Curitiba. The municipality of Curitiba recorded the highest number of fires in both years. According to the Fire Department classification, the vegetation type most affected by the fires was vacant lots. From the data obtained, we verified the need for environmental education measures aimed at the prevention of fires in vacant lots. Further research is recommended so that a profile of forest fires can be traced in the state and thus base prevention and control measures.

Characteristics and patterns of inappropriate disposal of construction and demolition waste in the municipality of Cabo Frio, Brazil

The main objective of this study was to identify and quantify inappropriate disposal of construction and demolition waste (CDW) in Cabo Frio, Brazil. The municipality has areas of environmental preservation and suffers significant environmental impacts due to the large flow of tourists and the inappropriate disposal of CDW. Data collection, carried out from June to September-2019, covered eighteen neighborhoods. 179 inadequate CDW disposal points were detected corresponding to a volume of approximately 448.75m3. The results were grouped by neighbourhood, kind of disposal place and CDW type. Pareto diagrams were also presented to help define priority neighborhoods for inappropriate disposal reducing actions. There was inappropriate disposal in areas of ecological, landscape or scientific interest, over drainage places, on public roads or sidewalks, and on vacant lots. Besides analysing the disposal characteristics and suggesting actions to solve the problem, a methodology for surveying of inappropriate disposal of CDW was proposed, including a method for the rough calculation of CDW volumes. The development of a smartphone application is another contribution that can facilitate data registration and assist decision making. Although the research focuses on a Brazilian municipality, the same work can be expanded to other municipalities in the world.

Conversion of Abandoned Property to Green Space as a Strategy to Mitigate the Urban Heat Island Investigated with Numerical Simulations

Impervious surfaces and buildings in the urban environment alter the radiative balance and surface energy exchange and can lead to warmer temperatures known as the urban heat island (UHI), which can increase heat-related illness and mortality. Continued urbanization and anthropogenic warming will enhance city temperatures worldwide, raising the need for viable mitigation strategies. Increasing green space throughout a city is a viable option to lessen the impacts of the UHI but can be difficult to implement. The potential impact of converting existing vacant lots in Kansas City, Missouri, to green spaces is explored with numerical simulations for three heat-wave events. Using data on vacant property and identifying places with a high fraction of impervious surfaces, the most suitable areas for converting vacant lots to green spaces is determined. Land-use/land-cover datasets are modified to simulate varying degrees of feasible conversion of urban to green spaces in these areas, and the local cooling effect using each strategy is compared with the unmodified simulation. Under more aggressive greening strategies, a mean local cooling impact of 0.5°–1.0°C is present within the focus area itself during the nighttime hours. Some additional cooling via the “park cool island” is possible downwind of the converted green spaces under the more aggressive scenarios. Although moderate and conservative strategies of conversion could still lead to other benefits, those strategies have little impact on cooling. Only an aggressive approach yields significant cooling.