Reducing Urban Heat Island Effects While Providing Affordable Housing in Bunker Hill

The Bunker Hill Public Housing development is a historic public housing building, home to a large population of racial and ethnic minorities, that requires major redevelopment and repair to enhance the safety of its residents. The Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) recently approved a $1.46 billion redevelopment for the property, a part of which is allocated to remove and replace ~250 mature trees around the public housing units. Removal of these trees would affect an already vulnerable population significantly more exposed to the effects of heat events, including heat-related stress, morbidity, and mortality, which will worsen with climate change in the coming years. While the BPDA proposal seeks to address the issue that the area already experiences 20% less cooling due to a lack of vegetation by replanting more trees, their estimated timescale of more than a decade for the canopy to just return to its current size is concerning. In order to mitigate the added heat stress caused by the tree removal, we propose the supplementary action of installing green roofs on buildings throughout the development. These green roofs would continue to provide cooling and beneficial community services even once the tree canopy has returned. These measures will serve as an appropriate stopgap measure until the canopy can return to size and expand as well as providing the community with the same co-benefits, such as air quality improvement, noise pollution reduction, community spaces, and locally grown food from community gardens, that more affluent parts of the city already experience. The installation of green roofs and supplemental vegetation will take only 0.25% of the entire redevelopment project budget and will have a large return in community wellness.

Performing Political Persuasion in the United States in the Early Years of the Republic

Theater productions were born out of a paradox in the United States of the Revolutionary War and shortly afterwards. While the nation’s dominant ideology was anti-theatrical, theater often served a nationalist agenda, co-defining the new American nation and its nascent identities – such were, for example, productions of Joseph Addison’s Cato at Valley Forge in 1778 and William Dunlap’s André at the New Park in New York in 1798. These theater events empowered the audience to publicly perform their national identity as Americans and exercise their republican fervor. Similarly, a production of Bunker-Hill by J. D. Burk at the Haymarket in Boston in 1797 was crucial in helping define the social and political identities of its audiences, who were motivated to attend the performances as an expression of their partisan preferences. This article shows that literary, theatrical and social practices served to constitute performatively the early American national identity.

Falar de si, falar do outro: o personagem Arturo Bandini de John Fante

Os romances analisados têm como elo o personagem Arturo Bandini, considerado alter ego do escritor John Fante, cujo contexto é o da Grande Depressão americana: Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), The Road to Los Angeles (cronologicamente este é o primeiro romance da saga, mas foi publicado apenas postumamente, em 1985), Ask the Dust (1939) e Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982). Considerando as temáticas e o estilo de escrita de John Fante nos romances aqui discutidos, podemos relacioná-los à experiência do escritor marginal em um panorama nada favorável: um futuro pouco promissor em um país que amarga um cenário econômico recessivo. Forjado para a escrita, Bandini configura-se como uma espécie de espelhamento do autor, um personagem no qual Fante se insere através do tempo e da narrativa no âmbito da escrita de cunho autobiográfico.

Retail Workers

This chapter charts the Los Angeles community benefits movement, launched at the turn of the millennium to strengthen low-income communities by transforming local redevelopment. The movement was built on an emergent partnership between community-based organizations promoting “equitable development” in the face of gentrification and labor movement groups, led by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), challenging the city-sponsored proliferation of low-wage jobs, especially in the multifaceted retail industry. The legal instrument used to codify campaign victories was the community benefits agreement, or CBA—a contract under which a developer agreed to provide specific levels of living wage jobs, affordable housing, and other benefits in exchange for community support for project approvals and public subsidies. Because CBAs offered a proactive response to redress negative development externalities through contractual compromise, they rested on a distinctive model of community organizing—leveraging the power of broad-based coalitions to extract benefits through negotiation—and thus enlisted a particular role for lawyers focused on strategic counseling and contract drafting. This chapter traces the evolution and outcomes of Los Angeles’s seminal community benefits campaigns: from the nation’s first CBA with the developer of a transformational downtown sports and entertainment complex anchored around the Staples Center, through a $500 million CBA centered on environmental mitigation in connection with the expansion of the L.A. International Airport, to the Grand Avenue CBA, which focused on affordable housing production in a proposed upscale development on downtown’s Bunker Hill. Following this arc, the chapter shows how the CBA movement conferred significant benefits on low-income communities and institutionalized pro-labor policy in the city—while also revealing tensions in the community-labor alliance at the movement’s heart and the limits of contract-based solutions to inequality.

Goodbye, Bunker Hill

Written soon after Ask the Dust appeared in late 1939, this little-known piece of non-fiction by John Fante appeared in the Los Angeles Times. In it, Fante reminisces about his early days in Los Angeles, those days in the early 1930s when he was young and broke and often hungry but filled with dreams of literary greatness. He presents a gallery of character sketches of the people he lived amidst, from the drunk who lived next door in Fante’s beloved Bunker Hill rooming house to the generous Japanese grocer at Grand Central Market. Filled with feeling for a lost time and cherished memories, this piece reveals a side of John Fante that will captivate readers who want to learn more about the author of Ask the Dust.

Od Lexington do Trenton kilka refleksji na temat żywiołu wody i jego wpływu na działania wojsk w pierwszych latach walki o amerykańską niepodległość

The battle of Lexington, 1775 started the American War of Independence. The Continental Army was raised by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1775 and two days after it fought in the first battle, known as the battle of Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775). George Washington was appointed as the Commander-in-Chief. He did not took part in it, staying already at Philadelphia. The British Pyrrhic victory caused the break in the fights till the Spring of 1776. In March because of a strong flury the British troops could not to attack, and as a result they left Boston on March 17. This day is celebrated as an Evacuation Day. While General Washington, with the American Army, was blockading the British garison in Boston, the other troops led the attack to invade Canada. They attacked from two maine rivers: The St. Lawrence River and St. Charles River. But the wide and ice covered rivers caused the big problem with transportation of soldiers. This time a snowstorm stopped the American attack, and they withdrew from Canada. The disastrous defeat of the Americans in the battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776 was the first battle after the Proclamation of Independence which led to the loss of New York and retreat to the Delaware River. Heavy rain was a non-attack factor. Among the presented battles, some of them were victories, but some were the defeats of the American soldiers. The nature and the elements of cold, frost, rains, snowstorms, icy roads and ice-covered rivers were not the ally for attacking troops. But sometimes, such an extreme weather conditions led to success, as it was during the battle of Trenton, after Washington’s famous crossing the Delaware River. The image on it is the best known battle picture in the world.

Fante, John (1909–1983)

American author John Fante (8 April 1909–8 May 1983) is best known for his Arturo Bandini novels, including The Road to Los Angeles (written 1933, published 1985), Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), Dreams from Bunker Hill (published 1982), and in particular Ask the Dust (1939). While his interwar novels and short stories were met with critical acclaim, he found far more financial success working in the film industry, where he wrote scripts for figures such as Orson Welles while socializing with other contract writers such as William Faulkner. His highly autobiographical fiction frequently showed the influence of, and made reference to, figures like Friedrich Nietzsche and H. L. Mencken. His work dealt largely with the experiences of working-class Americans of Italian descent and their interactions with other marginalized groups.