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Introduction: Curtis Bay (CB) is an environmental justice (EJ) community in South Baltimore. With a high concentration of industrial polluters and compounding non-chemical stressors, CB has experienced socioeconomic, quality of life, and health burdens for over 100 years. Today, these polluters include the open-air CSX Coal Terminal, waste-to-energy incinerators, and heavy diesel traffic through residential areas. The Community of Curtis Bay Association, Free Your Voice, and South Baltimore Community Land Trust are local organizations enacting a vision for equitable, healthy, and community-led development without industrial encroachment. In response to community-identified EJ concerns and an explosion at the CSX Coal Terminal, CB community groups partnered with academic researchers to develop a community-driven hyperlocal air monitoring and capacity building approach. This paper describes this approach to characterizing hyperlocal air quality in CB, building bridges between community residents and regulatory agencies, and nurturing a cohesive and effective community-academic partnership toward EJ. Methods: Using hyperlocal air monitoring, we are collecting real-time air pollution (particulate matter, black carbon, and ground-level gas species) and meteorological data from 15 low-cost sensors in residential and industrial areas of CB. We also use trail cameras to record activities at the CSX Coal Terminal. We merge air pollution and industrial activity data to evaluate the following: overall air quality in CB, multi-air pollutant profiles of elevated events, spatiotemporal changes in air quality in the community, patterns of industrial activity, and potential correlations between air quality and observed industrial activity. Members of our partnership also lead a high school course educating students about the history and ongoing efforts of the EJ movement in their community. Students in this course learn how to employ qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis methods to bring scientific support to community EJ concerns. Results and Discussion: Our hyperlocal air monitoring network and community-academic partnership are continuing to evolve and have already demonstrated the ability to respond to community-identified EJ issues with real-time data while developing future EJ leaders. Our reflections can assist other community and academic groups in developing strong and fruitful partnerships to address similar EJ issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

10 "A City Within a City: Great Growth of a Favored District", I New York Tribune i , June 17, 1892; W.E.B. Du Bois, I The Philadelphia Negro i (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 5; James Weldon Johnson, "The Harlem Gold Mine", I New York Age i , December 24, 1914; James Weldon Johnson, "Harlem: The Culture Capital", in I The New Negro i , ed. Historical Interpretations of Federal Urban Policy", I City & Community i 9, no. 1 (2010): 13-22; Sulemain Osman's, I The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn i (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Mary Rizzo's, I Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire i (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020); Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana's, "Race and Class in the News: How the Media Portrays Gentrification" (Working Paper Series 2016-2017.82, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at the University of California, Berkeley, 2018); Carla Shedd's, I Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice i (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2015); and Lynell Thomas's, I Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory i (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 3 Adrienne Brown, I The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race i (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); "Appraisal Narratives: Reading Race on the Mid-Century Block", I American Quarterly i 70, no. 2 (2018): 211-34. [Extracted from the article]

In the fall of 1968, as the city of Baltimore endured urban shrinkage, a group of architects founded the Neighborhood Design Center, a non-profit organization providing design services for disadvantaged communities, still active today. This paper, framed theoretically against the backdrop of participation models developed in the social sciences and the field of community design, argues that the NDC's approach to urban planning and design constitutes a successful example of participatory methodology but presents important shortcomings when evaluating the impacts of their projects in the current urban environment, with little to nonexistent traces of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents stories of living with dead trees in Baltimore, MD, USA to explore where, how, and with whom tree remains become lively through art, farming, and sustainability practices. These stories serve as a lens into the diverse ways practitioners produce knowledge about death, healing, disease, and decay as they encounter and transform dead nonhuman bodies. I find that practitioners who work with dead trees develop a circular understanding of death, and propose that decay is needed to heal bodies and remediate land. However, when these everyday embodied knowledges are translated from the level of body to the city, death does not become lively for all. When circular ways of knowing death are applied to the city, death is displaced into vulnerable human and tree bodies showing that the sustainable city both relies on and (re)produces the binaries of life and death. As a contrast, practitioner knowledges of tree death suggest sustainabilities that trouble established notions of life and death, bodies and environments, health and disease, and decay and beauty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study proposes to map the barriers to scaling the microfinance industry in the U.S., as it pertains to home maintenance and improvement for low-income households. The selected context of analysis is the American city of Baltimore, due to the city's high need for housing repair and large percentage of residents with limited access to finance. Originality/Value: Most research has discarded microfinance as a viable option for a housing market solution in the U.S. This paper discusses how the market of microfinance for housing repair could improve its financial sustainability seizing the smaller dollar value of repair loans, relative to housing purchase, and the high and recurring need for repair. Design/methodology/approach: Qualitative research was conducted on how microfinance for housing repair works in Baltimore City, leveraging secondary government and private research, along with interviews with lenders and borrowers. Data were analyzed through PESTEL framework, describing the macro-environmental context. Findings: The market for Housing Microfinance (HM) loan products in Baltimore matches the academic literature. Similar market demands exist as they relate to an increasingly aging housing stock. Lender supply of financing seems "healthy", but it is mostly from philanthropic or government sources favoring "affordability" over financial sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]