Beautiful Ruin: Creating Healthfields

Multiple programs promote redevelopment of land reuse sites, which are environmentally impacted or potentially contaminated sites. Historically, such programs have focused primarily on economic development. However, public health is an important consideration to address not only sustainable redevelopment but also health inequity and disparities. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s (ATSDR) Land Reuse Health Program is a special program to promote broad public health improvements through safe land reuse and redevelopment. Land reuse sites are virtually in every community in the U.S. and are a global problem. Brownfields are the greatest number of land reuse sites. With estimates of over 450,000 land reuse sites across the U.S., most communities suffer the burden of blight and contamination associated with these sites. ATSDR promotes and practices Healthfields Redevelopment: The safe reuse of environmentally distressed land to reduce exposures to contaminants and to improve overall health in the community. In this chapter, I highlight Navajo Nation Healthfields activities using ATSDR’s 5-step Land Reuse Strategy to Safely Reuse Land and Improve Health (5-step Land Reuse Model) and describe some of ATSDR’s Healthfields projects and related tools and resources for communities to create their own Healthfields practice.

Strata and Surface Influence Range of Deep Coal Mining for Mine Land Reuse

The rational assessment and determination of strata and surface influence range of underground coal mining is straightly associated to the safe production of the wellbore, the reuse of mine land and the regional development. With the depth of coal mining in the world increasing, if the boundary curve of strata and surface movement continues to be considered as a straight line, there will be a great deviation from the real situation, which will seriously waste the land resources of mining area. To solve this issue, the numerical simulation methods were employed to investigate the stratum and surface movement boundary curves of deep caving and backfilling mining in this paper. The findings indicated that: 1) The strata and surface movement boundary of deep caving and backfilling mining were all curves, and they were in accordance with the exponential function, but the influence range of strata and surface movement of deep different mining methods were different; 2) The backfilling rate of deep backfilling mining had an influence on movement boundary of strata and surface. With the backfilling rate decreasing, the influence range of strata and surface movement boundary were increased. 3) The research results were applied to a case in order to confirm the new methods for determining the influence range of strata and surface movement of deep mining. Example application shows that the safe production of the wellbore not only can be guaranteed, but also the reuse area of the mine field can be enhanced.

Black Urban Growers and the Land Question in Cleveland

Black gardeners and farmers in Cleveland, Ohio see themselves as stewards not only of the land they work and live on, but of a culture and historical past rooted in an agrarian relationship to land that is conceived of as a path to social, economic, political, and spiritual liberation. While community gardens (and most urban farms) do not create significant revenue for residents, they produce something outside of the traditional economy. This chapter explores the effects of development in other areas of the city on alternative land reuse, or how ancillary impacts of gentrification touch down to impact the efforts of urban farmers and gardeners to access land in a disinvested neighborhood with a seemingly endless supply of vacant lots.

Assessing Emergency Shelter Demand Using POI Data and Evacuation Simulation

Mapping the fine-scale spatial distribution of emergency shelter demand is crucial for shelter planning during disasters. To provide shelter for people within a reasonable evacuation distance under day and night disaster scenarios, we formed an approach for examining the distribution of day and night shelter demand at the plot-scale using point of interest (POI) data, and then analyzed the supply and demand status of shelters after an evacuation simulation built in Python programming language. Taking the downtown areas of Guangzhou, China as a case study, the results show that significant differences exist in the size and spatial distribution of shelter demand in daytime and nighttime, and the total demand is 7.929 million people, which is far larger than the resident population. The average evacuation time of all 16,883 routes is 12.6 min, and after the evacuation, 558 of 888 shelters exceed their capacity to varying degrees, accounting for 62.84% of the total, indicating that the shelters cannot completely receive the potential evacuees. The method proposed in this paper provides a direct quantitative basis for the number and size of new shelter resources being planned during urban renewal activities, and form a reference for land reuse and disaster prevention space organization in future urban planning.