ASU Scholarship Showcase

Major urban centers are warming due to a combination of global and local phenomena. City governments are increasingly adopting strategies to mitigate the causes and impacts of extreme heat on their populations. Among these strategies are high solar-reflectance (cool) surfaces installed on building roofs and walls. Use of cool surfaces is a cost-effective and simple strategy that replaces conventional darker surfaces with surfaces that have a high reflectance to shortwave (solar) energy.

This report reviews the recent history of cool-surface deployment efforts. This includes peer-reviewed literature, conference proceedings, and grey literature to identify challenges and barriers to wide-scale deployment of cool surfaces. We have also researched heat action plans and programs from cities and different codes and standards, as well as available incentive and rebate programs.

The review identifies challenges, barriers, and opportunities associated with large-scale deployment of cool surfaces and categorizes them broadly as being related to product development & performance or policies & mandates. It provides a foundation upon which we intend to build a roadmap for rapidly accelerating future deployments of cool surfaces. This roadmap will address identified challenges and incorporate lessons learned from historical efforts to generate a practical and actionable plan.

Accessibility is increasingly used as a metric when evaluating changes to public transport systems. Transit travel times contain variation depending on when one departs relative to when a transit vehicle arrives, and how well transfers are coordinated given a particular timetable. In addition, there is necessarily uncertainty in the value of the accessibility metric during sketch planning processes, due to scenarios which are underspecified because detailed schedule information is not yet available. This article presents a method to extend the concept of "reliable" accessibility to transit to address the first issue, and create confidence intervals and hypothesis tests to address the second.

Mexicans and Mexican Americans have resided in Arizona since the early 16th century. Their history, however, is severely under-documented in the state’s archival repositories. As of 2012, this community is represented in a mere 1-2% of the state’s known archival holdings, and 98% of such documentation is held at Arizona State University’s Chicano/a Research Collection (CRC). This article provides a historical review of the CRC’s establishment in 1970 and how its founding Curator, Dr. Christine Marín, transformed a small circulating book collection into Arizona’s largest repository for Mexican American history. It goes on to examine how the CRC’s sitting Archivist is using social media in tandem with a community-based workshop, bilingual promotional materials and finding aids, and description of unprocessed collections as community outreach and collection development tools in order to remedy the under-documentation of Mexican American history in Arizona. We argue that augmenting traditional archival field collecting methods with these strategies enables the CRC to build a more robust relationship with Arizona’s Mexican American community, allows us to continue expanding our archival holdings, and serves as an example for other repositories seeking to enhance their documentation of marginalized communities.