Events

The Department of Geography & Environmental Systems cordially invites you to join us for our Virtual Seminar Series on Wednesday, December 8th at Noon ET.

Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing

Dr. Akira Drake Rodriguez
Weizman School of Design
University of Pennsylvania

In 1936, the City of Atlanta was the first US city to open federally-financed and locally-administered public housing developments to low-income families in need of safe and sanitary housing (Techwood Homes).  For the city’s Black residents, and later, other marginalized groups, these developments provided political opportunity to assemble, mobilize, and make claims on the State in ways that were otherwise inaccessible. Over time, tenant associations served as conduits for working-class political interests centered in spatial justice – the very politics of planning that were used to segregate and marginalize developments and residents served as an organizing logic around spatial justice issues. However, in 2013, demolition began on one of the city’s last public housing developments for low-income families, nearly two decades after Techwood Homes was demolished for the 1996 Olympics. This talk examines the historical role of public housing in working-class politics and how the loss of tenant associations in the city has deepened contemporary inequities.

Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design.  Her research examines the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. She is the author of Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing, which explores how the politics of public housing planning and race in Atlanta created a politics of resistance within its public housing developments. Dr. Rodriguez was recently awarded a Spencer Foundation grant to study how educational advocates mobilize around school facility planning processes.

WebEx link: https://umbc.webex.com/umbc/j.php?MTID=m2abe173acf312dc65bb817ce8821eb5c

The Department of Geography & Environmental Systems cordially invites you to join us for our Virtual Seminar Series on Wednesday, November 17th at Noon ET.

Forest fires in western Cascadia: Drivers, characteristics, and indicators of post-fire resilience

Dr. Brian Harvey
Department of Environmental and Forest Sciences
University of Washington

Understanding the mechanisms that underpin forest resilience to fires is of high importance as the climate warms and fire activity increases worldwide. This knowledge gap is particularly wide in forests characterized by infrequent and severe fires, since opportunities to study fire events are inherently rare. In a series of associated projects, we characterize factors associated with, and indicators of forest resilience to fire west of the Cascade Crest in Washington and northern Oregon, USA (‘western Cascadia’). Using satellite burn severity mapping and landscape ecological analyses, we characterize patterns and drivers of stand-replacing fire from 1984 to 2020, building an understanding of the spatial signature of the western Cascadia fire regime. In a network of intensively measured permanent field plots distributed across forests burned between 2015 and 2020, we measure how pre-fire forest structure, burn severity, and topoclimate relate to several key post-fire indicators of resilience. Specifically, data on post-fire tree regeneration, early-seral vegetation communities, woody carbon, and fuel profiles are critical early indicators of resilience and potential long-term post-fire trajectories. Collectively, findings provide valuable insights into the role that fire plays in shaping western Cascadia, and provide the foundation for understanding resilience to fire now and in the future.

Brian J. Harvey is the Jack Corkery and George Corkery Jr. Endowed Professor in Forest Sciences and Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental and Forest at the University of Washington. His research focuses on understanding the nature of forest disturbances (e.g., fires and insect outbreaks) – and how forest structure and function is shaped by disturbances, interactions among disturbances, and climate. His work spans field studies to large spatial datasets and analyses, drawing on insights from landscape ecology and community ecology. His research focus is on disturbance ecology of forests in coastal California, the US Rocky Mountains, and Pacific Northwest.

WebEx link: https://umbc.webex.com/umbc/j.php?MTID=m26d16c860ebf467398ba94e77eb97cc5

Faculty participating: 

Dr. David Lansing

Dr. Yolanda Valencia

Dr. Maggie Holland

The Department of Geography & Environmental Systems cordially invites you to join us for our Virtual Seminar on Wednesday, November 3rd at Noon ET.

Transit Equity & Environmental Health in Baltimore

Dr. Megan Latshaw
Department of Environmental Health & Engineering
The Johns Hopkins University

Samuel Jordan
President, Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition

Public transit provides relatively low-cost access to jobs, food, healthcare and increased physical activity. Public transit also reduces pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by taking cars off the roads. Dr. Latshaw, along with Samuel Jordan of the Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition and several other experts did the first ever transit equity analysis for Baltimore City. Looking at transit, social vulnerability, air pollution & health effects, they identified 45 neighborhoods as opportunities for investment in transit infrastructure.

Megan Latshaw is the Director of Master’s Degree Programs in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. She also serves as co-chair of University’s Sustainability Plan Steering Committee, and as core faculty for the Environmental Challenges Focus Area of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative. As faculty at Hopkins, her efforts focus on designing healthy communities, connecting environmental health research with the real world, and improving environmental health surveillance (all through a justice and equity lens).

Samuel Jordan founded the Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition (BTEC) in 2016 to complete the Baltimore Red Line light rail project and recover its transformative economic benefits for the Baltimore metropolitan region and the African American, Hispanic, low-income, and transit-dependent communities adversely affected by the cancellation of the project in 2015. He has conducted community livability, issue organizing, and skills training programs in Baltimore and Washington, DC over the last twelve years. As an advisor to the Washington, DC Department of Transportation, Mr. Jordan was honored by the National Capital Chapter of the American Planning Association in 2013 for his community livability tool, “Community Livability Outreach Advisors.” Mr. Jordan is a former Chair of the DC Statehood Party; former Executive Director of Health Care Now! Washington, DC; former Director of the Program to Abolish the Death Penalty at Amnesty International USA; former Director of Organizing for AFSCME District 20 and Representative of AFSCME Local 2093 in Washington, DC; former Executive Director of the National Education Association DC Office; and former Organizer of the US-Kurdish Solidarity Initiative.  Mr. Jordan holds a Juris Doctorate from the Georgetown University Law Center

Please join us on Thursday, October 28th at 7PM for the first part of The Baltimore Conversations, a panel series bringing together academics and community activists working in Baltimore. This panel will focus on the structures and strategies shaping housing and the everyday lives of Baltimoreans. We hope to challenge the dominant discourse of ‘progress’ that is predicated on systems of extraction by centering forgotten and marginalized narratives of the city. We invite dialogue on collectively shaping a right to the city.

Event password: baltimore

Panelists include:

Mike Casiano, American Studies @ UMBC, Charm City Land Trust

Shelley Halstead, Black Women Build - Baltimore

Paige Glotzer, History @ University of Wisconsin

Eli Pousson, Neighborhood Design Center

Moderated by Dena Aufseeser (Geography and Environmental Systems, UMBC) and Dillon Mahmoudi (Geography and Environmental Systems, UMBC). Event generously sponsored by the Urban Geography journal with support from University of Maryland Baltimore County, Towson University, & Goucher College.

Join us (online) on Wednesday, October 27th at 5pm.  

Featuring: Dr. Maggie Holland, Dr. Dawn Biehler, and Dr. Dillon Mahmoudi.

The Department of Geography & Environmental Systems cordially invites you to join us for our Virtual Seminar on Wednesday, October 20th at Noon ET.

Integrating hydrologic and ecological models into economic analysis of water resource policy

The Department of Geography & Environmental Systems cordially invites you to join us for our Virtual Seminar on Wednesday, October 13th at Noon ET.

A Summer Of Flash Flood Disasters In 2021: The new normal in this era of climate change?

On behalf of the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education and their Fall 21 Seminar Series, the Department of Geography & Environmental Systems cordially invites you to join us for a Virtual Seminar on Friday, October 8th at 2PM ET.

Dr. Aditi Bhaskar
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Colorado State University

This talk presents an analysis of the changes to streamflow in the semi-arid area of Denver, Colorado, USA with a focus on (1) contributors to stream baseflow and (2) an analysis of changes in streamflow response to rainfall events with urbanization.  To estimate contributions to stream baseflow, we used water-stable isotope (δ¹⁸O and δ²H) analysis of surface water, tap water, and precipitation. Thirteen urban streams and two grassland streams were selected for sampling. An isotope mixing analysis using tap and precipitation end-members over a two week antecedent period estimated that tap water contributed a mean of 80% of urban baseflow on specific days in late summer. After taking contributions from infrastructure leakage into account, we estimated that lawn irrigation return flows made up 32% to 82% of analyzed baseflow. For changes to streamflow response to rainfall events, we used eight years of instantaneous streamflow data in 21 watersheds ranging in size from 1 to 90 km² with impervious areas ranging from 1% to 47%.  Using a semi-automated method to identify a total of 2,877 streamflow events, we analyzed event-based metrics of peak flow, runoff depth, runoff ratio, time to peak, duration, and number of streamflow events occurring in response to rainfall events, in addition to precipitation threshold and zero flow.  We found that more impervious watersheds had perennial or nearly perennial flow, unlike the least impervious watersheds which usually were dry.  Streamflow events were shorter in duration and had higher peak flow in watersheds with more impervious surface cover.  This work points to the need for local adaptation of stormwater management that seeks to mitigate the effects of streamflow changes with urbanization.