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It is assumed that climate change (global warming) worsens the living conditions for conifers and at the same time favours the cultivation of deciduous trees, including oaks. In fact, in Poland, for example, many more oaks are now being planted as forest-forming tree species than in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the monitoring of the health status of European forests (according to the International Co-operation Project) does not confirm these optimistic assumptions, and oak has been cited as one of the most damaged tree species in terms of defoliation in recent decades. The prospects for oak cultivation in European forestry are therefore a combination of abiotic conditions and biotic damage factors. This review article focuses in particular on the new threats posed by pathogenic organisms causing emerging diseases. These include newly identified bacteria responsible for the so-called Acute Oak Decline (AOD), oomycetes (especially those specialised in damaging fine roots, such as Phytophthora quercina T.Jung) and semi-parasites of the genus Loranthus. At the same time, the pressure from commonly observed insects and fungi described in connection with the complex syndrome of oak decline, which is divided into predisposing, inciting, and contributing factors (according to Manion's disease spiral), has not abated. Therefore, international, interdisciplinary research (such as that proposed in Oakland) is needed, using modern technologies (RS remote sensing) based on the comparison of satellite images (from different years), not only to inventory the most valuable oak stands in Europe (microrefugia) but also to identify trends in changes in their condition and biodiversity. As RS has its limitations (e.g., resolution), aerial monitoring should be complemented by quantitative and qualitative inventory from the ground, e.g., monitoring of the presence of soil microorganisms using effective molecular biological methods (e.g., Next-Generation Sequencing NGS). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The growing incidence of lower gastrointestinal bleeding (LGIB) is leading to a rise in-hospital admissions even though most LGIB episodes are self-limiting. The Oakland and SHA2PE scores were designed to identify patients best suited to outpatient care. Our aim is explore the validity of the SHA2PE score and compare both of these scores in terms of predictiveness of safe discharge. Methods: Retrospective observational study of LGIB patients admitted to a tertiary hospital between June 2014 and June 2019. Safe discharge was defined as the absence of all the following: blood transfusion, haemostatic intervention, re-bleeding, in-hospital death, and re-admission due to LGIB within 28 days after discharge. Results: From 595 hospital admissions for LGIB, 398 episodes were included. Fifty-four per cent met safe discharge criteria, with these cases being younger, with a lower score in the Charlson's index and significantly higher haemoglobin concentration upon arrival. The performance of both scores was good, with an AUC for the Oakland score of 0.85 (95% CI 0.82–0.89) and of 0.797 (95% CI 0.75–0.84) for the SHA2PE score. The Oakland score performed better in terms of prediction of safe discharge, with a positive predictive value and specificity of 100% when a cut-off value of ≤ 8 points was used; however, only a minority of patients might benefit from its implementation given its low sensitivity. Conclusions: Almost half of the patients admitted for LGIB met criteria for safe discharge. However, the available indexes only allow for the identification of a small proportion of those patients candidates for outpatient care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Oakland EcoBlock is a whole-systems urban sustainability project that aims to prototype a pathway to affordable urban decarbonization by means of block-scale retrofitting that can reduce more than 50% of home energy usage. Considering the behavioral dimension of the energy retrofit process is key to understanding how household decision-making can enhance the adoption and performance of building efficiency measures – particularly in the EcoBlock, where low-to-moderate income constraints may limit accessibility to energy efficient upgrades. This study uses two survey instruments to explore key drivers of energy efficient technology adoption and operational behavior amongst EcoBlock residents.

This study traces how Black lesbians in the San Francisco Bay Area made a place for themselves in the world at the end of the twentieth century, after the decline of the Black Power Movement and before the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Geocoding and analyzing the content of a Black lesbian journal in the San Francisco Bay Area that had global distribution, the author examines how the placemaking of Black lesbians remade them as cultural‐political subjects, expanded their networks, and inspired them to reimagine their relations with the earth. As they crafted cultural spaces across the African diaspora, they faced threats—most notably, street violence, harsh policing and ecological degradation—yet they also experienced joyful interactions with each other, with allies and with nature. The belief grew in their cultural spaces that their liberation required world transformation and that they could change the world. This research, providing a frame for studying the interaction between the making of cultural spaces and the formation of political solidarities, contributes to urban movements research, critical environmental justice studies, and Black feminist/LGBTQ+ research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional, Western geographers have theorized a separation between land, capital, and labor, which naturalizes a conception of geography as completely independent of sociohistorical factors. This conventional ideology strips the landscape from its ongoing relationship with capital and labor, isolating the land from its white supremacist histories, which—according to Andrea Smith—are embodied through processes of anti-black racism/slaveability, genocide, and orientalism. Scholarship in critical geography has revealed that forces of colonialism and imperialism transcend conventional spatial-temporal limitations, constructing geographies of confinement for people in contemporary times. In focusing on Moms 4 Housing—a collective of Black, marginally housed mothers in Oakland, California—along with Abahlali baseMjondolo (Abahlali)—a Black, South African grassroots movement run by and for shack dwellers in Durban, South Africa—this paper investigates how racial capitalism maps onto the lives of Black peoples in localized regions. More particularly, it offers a transnational study that works to illuminate how African peoples are able to transform racialized sites into sites of resilience. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, my work contributes to a spatial understanding of how neoliberal capitalism confines Black peoples to particular racialized landscapes across the diaspora. Rooted in the Black Radical Tradition, along with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s conceptualization of abolition geographies, I examine what pushes distinct African peoples to mobilize around humanity in ways that advance a transformative and inclusive politic of Freedom. Ultimately, this study reveals similarities in processes and practices, as well as “slippages, openings, and contradictions” between Black peoples in relation to a global fight against racial capitalism and white supremacy.

This article analyzes the spontaneous production of graffiti art and murals covering the entrances of businesses in the central business district of Oakland, CA, in the wake of the global protest movements, in 2020, against state violence and systemic racism. I argue that the art made legible what gets hidden through the violent processes of gentrification, neoliberal urbanism, and displacement/dispossession. The paper rethinks what borders, policing, and reclamation mean in a time of economic instability and a global health crisis, through the placement of these vernacular expressions in Downtown Oakland. What is revealed through the art is the convergence of two co-constitutive publics–a segregated, decaying city mostly inhabited by poor and working-class Black and Latinx residents and laborers, and a modern, prosperous, neoliberal city that caters to a privileged class of white residents and tourists–especially as the city grappled with the management and regulation of public space in the midst of a global pandemic. The article thus theorizes public space as layered and always contested, and not simply a space of conflict but also collective engagement.

This paper implements a framework that catalogs and maps opportunities at a city level to support the electrification of the transportation system in an equitable way. Leveraging on the use of hyper-local air quality data, paired with sociodemographic indicators, we evaluate the framework in the City of Oakland, CA under a context of public and private transport areas to prioritize interventions and incentives, while reducing environmental hazard exposure under an equity focus. Following the recognition of racial and socio-economic disparities, the subsequent steps of implementing operational strategies are to identify specific bus routes in the city in which decarbonization would render the highest impact with respect to the distribution of environmental burden, and to identify regions in which private vehicle interventions would render the highest impact with respect to racial and social equity and mobility.

This paper implements a framework that catalogs and maps opportunities at a city level to support the electrification of the transportation system in an equitable way. Leveraging on the use of hyper-local air quality data, paired with sociodemographic indicators, we evaluate the framework in the City of Oakland, CA under a context of public and private transport areas to prioritize interventions and incentives, while reducing environmental hazard exposure under an equity focus. Following the recognition of racial and socio-economic disparities, the subsequent steps of implementing operational strategies are to identify specific bus routes in the city in which decarbonization would render the highest impact with respect to the distribution of environmental burden, and to identify regions in which private vehicle interventions would render the highest impact with respect to racial and social equity and mobility.

The paper attempts to analyze whether the music video of the song "Alright" by Kendrick Lamar reveals new conceptions of the urban occupation and power relations within Oakland. To conduct this reflection, the author uses a Fanonian analysis of selected scenes from the music video with police officers and an analysis of the aesthetics of Noir cinema present in the music video. The article's argument is that the image of the police helps construct a dichotomous imagery of dangerous places in a city: on one hand, for certain groups, the police can represent the fight against crime; on the other hand, for other groups it represents the danger personified. According to the author, the video not only criticizes police violence but also reclaims urban periphery as an alive space of Black culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project examines risk and protective factors for preterm birth (PTB) among Black women in Oakland, California. Women with singleton births in 2011-2017 (n = 6199) were included. Risk and protective factors for PTB and independent risk groups were identified using logistic regression and recursive partitioning. Having less than 3 prenatal care visits was associated with highest PTB risk. Hypertension (preexisting, gestational), previous PTB, and unknown Women, Infant, Children (WIC) program participation were associated with a two-fold increased risk for PTB. Maternal birth outside of the USA and participation in WIC were protective. Broad differences in rates, risks, and protective factors for PTB were observed.

Instructor: Pablo GonzalezTerm: Summer 2021Course #: HUM 132AC / ENV DES 132AC / ETHSTD 190ACWhy read this case study?How can new technologies encourage students to observe, research, analyze, and share knowledge about urban environments? Can mapping public protest art and creating augmented reality projects and podcasts inspire students to ask deep questions about power, race, and privilege in urban neighborhoods?In the wake of protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, thousands of people gathered in overwhelmingly peaceful protests in Oakland, as across the country. Fearing unrest, many building owners in commercial districts covered ground-floor storefront windows with plywood.Local artists used this plywood as canvases to express their outrage and resistance to racism and state violence. These temporary murals were important records of a historic moment when the Black Lives Matter movement gained new visibility.However, within a year, many of the murals had been whitewashed or the plywood they were on was removed.In order to preserve the meaning and memory of this protest art, students in Dr. Pablo Gonzalez’ Summer 2021 course Public Art and Social Justice: Mapping Mural Art and Narratives used photographs of these ephemeral murals to create a virtual public gallery of this important art. The students in this class, which was supported by Future Histories Lab (part of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative) mapped the art and created augmented reality projects that allowed people visiting the storefronts to use their smartphones to see images of the murals that had been removed.The students also tracked down and interviewed a number of the artists and created podcasts and audio clips for the augmented reality project that convey the artists’ intentions to future generations.The gallery, augmented reality projects, and podcasts can be accessed through links in this case study.

The article reports that California has been a frontier state, one that has attracted pioneers, inventors, moguls, musicians, directors and actors amongst a panoply of creative and entrepreneurial characters. Topics include examines its always obliging weather and its optimism and energy help to define the concept of the "American Dream".

This transcript shares a May 2019 conversation with Josh Healey, an Oakland-based writer, artist, and filmmaker, about his work with the independent web series The North Pole. The interview was conducted with several members of the Ethnic Studies faculty from Saint Mary's College of California. Healey explains the connections he sees between politics, humor, and storytelling, and delves into the strategies and struggles of the creative process, including the value of personal relationships, collaboration, and representing real people and real life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2021, the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC) purchased Esther's Orbit Room—the last remaining venue of Oakland's West Coast blues scene—to build a haven for Black culture and livelihood. As a novel system of land ownership inspired by land trusts, cooperatives, and social movements, EB PREC orchestrates local, collective governance to harness the staying power of ownership and resist its commodification. EB PREC's complex institutional structure is mirrored in the manifold enclosures of the Orbit Room property, which expands, contracts, and subdivides an ever-contested form of parcelization. As an architectural designer and member of EB PREC, the author combines an analysis of the Orbit Room's as-built conditions with an institutional portrait of EB PREC. This article asks how alignment and misalignment between ownership and property lines can enable—and preclude—the decommodification of property and transform it into an enduring source of power for those so long excluded from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the midst of the global SARS-CoV-2 epidemiological crisis unfolds another contagion: the eviction epidemic. This essay attends to the work of Moms for Housing, an organization of formerly homeless and marginally housed Black mothers in Oakland, California who have organized to confront dispossession, real-estate speculation, and the privatization of housing. Using Black feminist and queer of color intellectual frameworks as ciphers through which to interpret and properly attribute weight to the organization's activism, the essay argues that Moms for Housing not only offers potential flightlines toward a post-property future—one in which housing is positioned as a basic human right—but also a generative critique of the home as a site of racialized and gendered subject formation. Indeed, through their work, the reconception of kinship formation and territorial formation are understood to be mutually constitutive, abolitionist projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter provides a review of the papers focused on developing the ways that Contemporary Archaeologies in Old Places provides a framework for understanding ongoing processes of dispossession, displacement, and disenfranchisement historically experienced by marginalized and economically vulnerable populations. At the same time, through community‐engaged praxis, the authors also demonstrate the ways that contemporary archaeological research can contribute to issues of sustainability and social justice, particularly through the use of methodologies that are easily reproduceable by non‐experts. The author tests this assertion by, in the context of recent protests against Anti‐Black police violence, taking a contemporary archaeological perspective to the old place in which she lives, Bushrod, Oakland, where the Black Panther Self‐Defense party was founded and engaged in its early social justice work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we achieve equitable development, we increase the capacity of people of color to strengthen their communities and determine their own future and that of their neighborhoods. We distribute the benefits and burdens of growth equitably among people of all races, ethnic backgrounds, incomes, and geographies/neighborhoods. We encourage multicultural communities where tenured and newcomer residents can thrive. And we provide meaningful choices for the most impacted people of color to live, work, and define their own culture throughout all neighborhoods.

In 2018, a White woman called the police on two Black men who were holding a cookout on the shores of Lake Merritt in Oakland, CA. Branded "BBQ Becky" by Black Twitter, this incident ricocheted around the digital mediascape, contributing to a national debate about racist policing and the dangers of "living while Black." Many commentators interpreted the struggle over Black cultural practices at Lake Merritt in terms of the now common, even generic, narrative of tech-induced gentrification in the Bay Area. But this elided the fact that the violence of BBQ Becky reproduced an enduring drive to regulate Black geographies and sounds as a means to control the post-emancipation social order. This article argues that scholars and activists need to attune to the "racial reverberations" that continue to loop in contemporary spatial struggles, especially ones involving sound. Drawing upon archival and ethnographic materials, it provides a recursive account of struggles over Black public cultures in Oakland from World War II until the present, thus suggesting that the racial/spatial control embodied in BBQ Becky can't be reduced to the gentrification narrative alone. Ultimately, this article centers the temporalities of African American epistemologies and musics to realign U.S. gentrification studies with the haunting rhythms of geographic harm and repair experienced by those most impacted by urban dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]