Digital Commons Network^™

Incorporating Local Foods Into Low-Income Families’ Home-Cooking Practices: The Critical Role Of Sustained Economic Subsidies, Jennifer Gaddis, Amy K. Coplen, Molly Clark-Barol, Allea Martin, Claire K. Barrett, Lauren Lubowicki

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Alternative food practices, including farmers markets and CSAs, are often inaccessible to lowincome families. Subsidized CSAs and fruit and vegetable prescription programs have the potential to decrease food insecurity, increase fresh fruit and vegetable consumption, and generate better health outcomes. However, several challenges can limit logistics of distribution and an inability to cook from scratch due to a lack of kitchen infrastructure, time, or skills. In this paper, we investigate two dietrelated health programs conducted with community partners in Madison, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon. We used photovoice to evaluate and enhance these programs, which supplied lowincome participants with free or …

Reflection Roundtable: White Supremacy In Oregon History, Karen J. Gibson, Darrell Millner, Carmen Thompson, Adrienne Nelson

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Oregon Historical Society Panel Discussion with Dr. Karen Gibson, Dr. Darrell Millner, Dr. Carmen Thompson, and Justice Adrienne Nelson, Moderator. Reflection on Hatfield Lecture by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. October 29, 2020.

This panel reflects upon the Oregon Historical Society event two days prior, the second virtual Hatfield Lecture Series talk held October 27 that featured the one and only Henry Louis Gates, Jr., host of Finding Your Roots and author of a number of books including his latest work, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow.

Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories Of Abolition Day, Amber Butts, Ayize Jama-Everett, Calvin Williams, Donte Clark, Lisa Bates, Naudika Williams, Shawn Taylor, Walidah Imarisha, Amir Kadar

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

The anthology is available here for download, and the YouTube video of authors reading excerpts is embedded.

Wakanda Dream Lab and PolicyLink present a storyworld of safety and freedom in a future without prisons and policing.

While debates about “defunding” raise the question of what a new public safety system might look like, authors and artists are showing us what is possible through speculative fiction. In the spirit of visionary fiction, we convened future-bending Black storytellers for a Black Speculative Writer's Room Project, and together, we created an anthology of freedom dream stories exploring a world after the abolition of …

Racial Justice Is Climate Justice: Racial Capitalism And The Fossil Economy, Julius Mcgee, Patrick Trent Greiner

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

The narrative of oppression moves through dialectical pressures. Capitalism evolved from the feudal order that preceded it, creating new forms of racial oppression that benefited an emerging ruling class [1]. Racial tensions evolve alongside economic oppression that subjugates labor to capital. The preceding racial order molds to emerging mechanisms of expropriation and exploitation by way of force and resistance. Beneath the surface of these tensions lies the interconnected threads of ecological and human expropriation. At the heart of all oppression, lies the manipulation of reproduction. The social processes necessary to reproduce black and brown communities, the ecological processes necessary to …

How Long Can Neoliberalism Withstand Climate Crisis?, Julius Mcgee, Patrick Greiner

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

The climate crisis is proving to be antithetical to the neoliberal machines that define current forms of social organization. On the one hand, reducing fossil fuel consumption, the largest contributor to climate change, requires collaborative efforts. These efforts must take into consideration the foundational role of fossil fuels in modern economies. We must acknowledge, for instance, that most peoples’ livelihoods are tethered to fossil fuels, which recent studies have demonstrated is not the result of random historical development but deliberate policy.1 Fossil fuels continue to be used as a form of social domination—a means to expropriate productive and reproductive …

The Role Of Building Characteristics, Demographics, And Urban Heat Islands In Shaping Residential Energy Use, Chrissi Argyro Antonopoulos, Alec Trusty, Vivek Shandas

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

As global temperatures continue to rise, questions about infrastructure capacity to keep up with energy demand are increasingly germane. Energy demand is mediated by several structural and environmental conditions, though we have a limited understanding about the role of differences in local ambient temperatures as a predictor for energy demand. This study assesses the effects of residential building structure, socio-demographics, and ambient temperature conditions of a neighborhood to overall energy expenditures of a household. Using annual utility billing and demographic data, existing tax-lot records, and an unusually high-resolution description of ambient temperatures, we ask two research questions: (1) What role …

Adaptive Injustice: Responsibility To Act In The Plastics Economy, Katie Conlon

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

How can plastic material be reduced, reused, repurposed, or salvaged so it is kept out of rivers, oceans and ecosystems in general? Social awareness about the impacts of plastic pollution is growing, and creative, social solutions to the ‘plastic menace’ are popping up globally. Every day, one can read about the latest, innovative method for managing plastic waste at the local level: plastic PET bottles stuffed with plastic-film food wrappers to make ‘ecobricks;’ paving roads with plastic waste; making yoga-wear out of marine plastic pollution; weaving plastic into tote bags; using a 3D printer to make plastic into products for …

The Effects Of Historical Housing Policies On Resident Exposure To Intra-Urban Heat: A Study Of 108 Us Urban Areas, Jeremy Hoffman, Vivek Shandas, Nicholas Pendleton

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

The increasing intensity, duration, and frequency of heat waves due to human-caused climate change puts historically underserved populations in a heightened state of precarity, as studies observe that vulnerable communities—especially those within urban areas in the United States—are disproportionately exposed to extreme heat. Lacking, however, are insights into fundamental questions about the role of historical housing policies in cauterizing current exposure to climate inequities like intra-urban heat. Here, we explore the relationship between “redlining”, or the historical practice of refusing home loans or insurance to whole neighborhoods based on a racially motivated perception of safety for investment, with present-day summertime …

Transforming Innovation For Decarbonisation? Insights From Combining Complex Systems And Social Practice Perspectives, Nicola Labanca, Ângela Guimarães Pereira, Matt Watson, Kristian Krieger, Dario Padovan, Laura Watts, Mithra Moezzi, Grégoire Wallenborn, Rebecca Wright, Erik Laes, Multiple Additional Authors

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Technological innovations seem to be among the great promises for achieving the urgent modernisation of economies towards carbon-neutrality. Ranging from fusion energy, bio-based fuels, carbon capture and storage to PV panels and so-called smart energy systems, plenty of technologies promise to reduce use or greenhouse gas emissions of carbon based energy sources. This techno-centric view disregards to a great extent that technological change affects and is affected by societal practices and norms.

The present paper argues that contemporary methodological approaches informed by complex systems and social practices theories provide urgently needed insights into innovation for decarbonisation. It specifically addresses the …

Albina Zone, Lisa Bates

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Story Summary:
In near future Portland, the police have been abolished, but what else is needed for real liberation? A gifted young woman and her mother struggle to communicate across a rift of unspoken history.

Foreword to Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories of Abolition Day

There are times when our lived reality feels stranger than science fiction - a viral pandemic, an economic crisis, global conflicts on multiple frontlines, the rise of white supremacist racism, a wave of state violence against Black bodies, the fiery uprisings across the nation, and militarized guards deployed in response… It was the Red Summer …