Academic literature on the topic 'Brown's Downtown'

Pós-Graduação em Segurança e Higiene no Trabalho
A realização deste projecto individual, surge no âmbito da 20ª Pós-graduação em Segurança e Higiene no Trabalho, ministrada pela Escola Superior de Tecnologias / Escola Superior de Ciências Empresariais, do Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal. A execução deste projecto, consistiu na aplicação dos conteúdos programáticos desenvolvidos no decorrer do curso, de forma a implementar no projecto todos os conhecimentos apreendidos nas diferentes áreas. Foi pedido que esta componente prática fosse aplicada em contexto real de trabalho, por isso a escolha deste projecto remeteu para uma temática que se enquadrasse no âmbito da actividade efectuada na entidade patronal. Visto a minha área profissional ser a arquitectura e encontrar-me a desenvolver a actividade num atelier de arquitectura, a Arquipeople, Lda., surgiu a oportunidade de elaborar um Plano de Segurança para um projecto desenvolvido pela empresa, nomeadamente um hotel com designação de Brown´s Downtown, cujo requerente é Baixa & Chiado Hotel, S.A. O presente plano consiste na elaboração de medidas de autoprotecção para o estabelecimento hoteleiro, localizado em área histórica da Baixa de Lisboa, na Rua dos Sapateiros, 69-79, sendo um edifício correspondente à designada arquitectura civil pombalina, adaptado à morfologia plana do território e à ortogonalidade da estrutura urbana. O edifício é por isso classificado como Imóvel de Interesse Público, enquanto integrado no conjunto da Baixa Pombalina. O mesmo encontra-se também identificado no Inventário Municipal do Património. A localização do edifício, os antecedentes históricos e os processos construtivos que o caracterizam, constitui um factor de risco em caso de uma situação de emergência, para os utentes que usufruem das instalações e serviços. As Medidas de Autoprotecção são um conjunto de acções e medidas (de organização e gestão da segurança), destinadas a prevenir e controlar os riscos que possam visar as pessoas e bens, de forma a garantir a salvaguarda destes em caso de ocorrência de uma situação de perigo, nomeadamente de incêndio. Estas medidas têm como objectivo a preparação e organização dos meios existentes e são implementadas de forma a dar uma resposta adequada às possíveis situações de emergência, garantindo a integração destas acções como um instrumento de prevenção e emergência. Os edifícios, estabelecimentos e recintos devem estar providos, no decorrer da exploração dos respectivos espaços, de medidas de autoprotecção, com a implementação das condições de segurança julgadas necessárias ao empreendimento, visando quer a protecção dos seus utentes, quer a das instalações contra qualquer situação de emergência. Para a elaboração do presente plano, teve-se em conta as condições gerais de auto-protecção, dispostas no Artigo 21° do Decreto-Lei nº220/2008 de 12 de Novembro e no Artigo 198° da Portaria nº1532/2008 de 29 de Dezembro.

Plum Creek begins in drainage from farms on the west side of the city of Oberlin, Ohio, and flows eastward through a city golf course, a college arboretum, and the downtown area. East of the city, the stream receives the effluent from the city sewer facility before it joins with the Black River, which flows north through two rust-belt cities, Elyria and Lorain, before emptying into Lake Erie 25 miles west of Cleveland. Plum Creek shows all of the signs of 150 years of human use and abuse. As late as 1850 the stream ran clear even in times of flood, but now it is murky brown year-round. Because of pollution, sediments, and the lack of aquatic life, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers it to be a “nonattainment” stream. Yet it survives, more or less. To most residents of Oberlin, Plum Creek is little more than a drain and sewer useful for moving water off the land as rapidly as possible. Few regard it as an aesthetic asset or ecological resource. The character of Plum Creek changes quickly as it flows eastward into downtown Oberlin. Runoff from city streets enters the stream where the creek runs under the intersection of Morgan and Professor Streets. One block to the east, a larger volume of runoff polluted by oil and grease from city streets enters the creek as it flows under Main Street, past a Midas Muffler shop, a NAPA Auto Parts Store, and City Hall, located in the flood plain. Where Plum Creek flows under Main Street, an increased volume of storm water and consequently increased stream velocity have widened the banks and cut the channel from several feet to a depth of 10 feet or more. The city has attempted to stabilize the stream by lining the banks with concrete or by riprapping with large chunks of broken concrete. The aquatic life that exists upstream mostly disappears as Plum Creek flows through the downtown. Bending to the northeast, the creek passes through suburban backyards, past the municipal wastewater plant, a Browning Ferris Industries landfill, and on toward the west fork of the Black River and Lake Erie.

Urbanization in Kingston since independence, as the previous chapter demonstrated, has placed a very heavy burden on the already disadvantaged lower class. This burden is expressed in their dependence on the informal sector of employment, high rates of unemployment, rental of high-density accommodation (or outright squatting), shared access to toilet facilities, and lack of piped-water connections in the tenements—all these problematic characteristics piling up in the downtown areas—quintessentially in West Kingston. There is clearly a stratification of living conditions ranging from affluence in the uptown suburbs via a modicum of comfort in the middle zone around Half Way Tree and Cross Roads to outright deprivation in the downtown neighbourhoods. It was argued in the previous chapter that this stratification of living conditions is underpinned by class-differentiated neighbourhoods; as this chapter will show, these circumstances mesh with—and reinforce—colour-class stratification and cultural pluralism, or what I have called plural stratification (to distinguish it from class stratification alone). After the Second World War, it became the conventional wisdom among Caribbean social scientists (of local birth) to depict Jamaica—and the Windward and Leeward Islands—as colour-class stratifications. This had the advantage of linking these Caribbean stratifications to occupational/class systems in the US and Europe, while pointing to a colonial history of colour differentiation, which shadowed class and reinforced it. So, the upper class was white or pass-as-white, the middle class brown and black, and the lower class black with some brown (Henriques 1953: 42). A number of racially or ethnically distinct groups originally fell outside this colour-class stratification, but had, over time, been accommodated within it: Jews were absorbed into the upper class, as were the Syrian professionals; Chinese, the remaining Syrians, and a few East Indians were middle class; the majority of East Indians were lower class. Two further aspects of colour-class need underlining. There was a tendency for its advocates to regard class as unproblematic and consensual, as in the American tradition of social analysis (Parsons 1952). In short, the whole colour-class system was dependent upon the almost complete acceptance by each group of the superiority of the white, and the inferiority of the black (Henriques 1953).

The focus in this chapter shifts from the ghetto, politics, and violence in downtown Kingston (Ch. 5 and 6) to concentrate on the development of the plastic and performing arts during the last four decades of Jamaica’s decolonization and the first four decades after independence. Inevitably, it also concentrates on the experience and achievements of two generations of Jamaicans, who, with the help of a handful of Britishers during the 1920s and 1930s, laid the foundations for the flourishing of creole culture (the culture of the brown and black population) as national culture after 1962. However many of the themes that have previously been investigated— colonialism, race, pluralism, class, the ghetto, and politics resurface in this chapter and are bound into the argument. The chapter opens with a brief account of the late-colonial need to forge a national identity in Jamaica instead of relying on the imitative provincialism of white colonial culture. It then looks at the cultural complexity of Kingston, drawing brief attention to distinctions in family, religion, education, and especially language between the three principal social strata, in the lower two of which the modern arts movement has been embedded. The focus is subsequently placed on the plastic arts—sculpture, wood carving, pottery, and painting; poetry, and the novel; pantomime, dance, and plays. The final section concentrates on popular music and the creative role of the Rastafari movement in the development and diffusion of reggae, one of the quintessential expressions of Jamaican national culture. Here low-status black culture has been not only a national unifying focus for all (or almost all) sections of society, but also a vehicle for projecting a Jamaican black identity on to the international stage. However, reggae has been partially eclipsed by dance-hall (and slackness), and this has introduced renewed tensions between uptown and downtown. A major feature of Jamaican national culture (as it emerged around independence) is that it is creole, or local to Jamaica. However, it is also a plural culture, in that virtually all branches of the arts are divided into tutored and untutored versions: Cooper (1993) uses the terms ‘book’ and ‘long head’, reflecting the involvement of the middle and lower strata, respectively.

In Barra De Cazones, Veracruz, we ordered Modelos at an empty beach­front restaurant, La Palapa de Kime, on a muggy July afternoon. A handful of vacationers were scattered on the expansive, pebbled, brown sand beach. This was not the tropical paradise of Cabo San Lucas brochures—with expensive hotels and fine white sands—but the scarcity of tourists in this beautiful and serene Gulf Coast village was puzzling at first glance. The roads into town are good—pleasant, twisting runs through a remote and picturesque rainforest, in fact—and a couple of medium-sized cities and an airport are within an hours’ drive. We later learned that the electricity in town was sporadic and that the hotel accommodations were expensive but shoddy. And along the downtown strip, half-constructed buildings seemed frozen in their incompleteness, as if they were as ambivalent about the future as the inhabitants were. Roofless, these cinderblock buildings stood mute and abandoned alongside the central beachfront road, rusting rebar jutting out of the tops of their gray walls. In front of them, stacks of bricks lay idly on the sidewalk. This quiet fishing and farming village of a few thousand would like to reinvent itself as a tourist destination. Government efforts to create fishing cooperatives and plants for processing and freezing fish expanded Mexico’s annual catch in the 1970s and 1980s, but today Mexico’s coasts are dominated by U.S., Canadian, and Japanese boats, which catch ten times what Mexican boats do. Small-scale fishermen in places like Barra de Cazones fetch low prices for their fish, and high fuel prices take a sizable chunk of their meager earnings. With fishermen struggling, little investment in infrastructure, high interest rates, and few jobs, this lonely town’s main business, like that of the nearby villages of Volador and Agua Dulce, is out-migration. Archimedes, a proud and boisterous local entrepreneur, was frying several freshly caught fish in a wide skillet and extolling their virtues in a theatrical baritone.

On a fall morning in 1980, Pitzer College freshman George Somogyi walked out of his dormitory, looked up, and froze in his tracks. In front of him was something incredible. An enormous mountain, over 10,000 feet tall, stretched up to the sky in the near distance. What made this sight so bizarre is that the mountain wasn’t there before. Somogyi had been at college for three months and had never laid his eyes on Mount Baldy, a five-million-year-old formation that stands just a few miles from this campus on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County, because it was shrouded in smog so thick that it obscured the view for months at a time. Air pollution is a problem well known to the people of Los Angeles. In the 1970s their city became an icon of urban air pollution, as photos of brown haze choking downtown LA circulated worldwide. The air was so hazardous that people were hospitalized by the thousands. Yet today the air around Los Angeles, while far from perfect, is markedly improved. The amount of smog has been sliced in half since the 1970s, even as the population has doubled in size. More impressive still, the amount of particulate pollution—the small dust particles that lodge deep in the lungs and are especially harmful to human health—has been reduced to one-fifth the levels experienced in 1955. How did a change of this magnitude come about? This physical transformation was precipitated by a political transformation, as the people of Los Angeles joined together and fought for new rules to clean up the air. Beginning in the 1940s, citizens demanded that city officials look into the causes of the problem, which were not obvious at the outset. Their efforts led to the creation of the Los Angeles Bureau of Smoke Control in 1945. Soon the movement spread throughout California, where in 1947 state legislators passed the Air Pollution Control Act—a full quarter century before national policymakers adopted similar legislation.