Built Environment and Health Research Group

JAMA just published an editorial co-written by, Andrew Rundle, entitled “Can Walkable Urban Design Play a Role in Reducing the Incidence of Obesity-Related Conditions?”.  The editorial provides a perspective on a study published in JAMA by Creatore et al., that assessed the prevalence of obesity and incidence of diabetes from 2001 to 2012, by level neighborhood walkability across 15 municipalities in Canada.

Urban design to support active transport (walking and cycling) is an attractive avenue for public health interventions to increase population levels of physical activity and reduce the burden of obesity and diabetes. In the urban design/planning literature walkability is typically described in terms of the “D variables“: density of population, density of residences, density of public transit stops, design of street networks, and destination accessibility.  In many cities there is not enough undeveloped space to create new large urban parks that support exercise and recreational physical activity. Local governments have some policy mechanisms for influencing neighborhood retail food access: tax and loan incentives can be used to promote the development of new supermarkets, but efforts to ban new fast food outlets are controversial and have not been found to be effective. However, improvements in neighborhood walkability can be promoted through permitting, zoning, land use regulations, and street design, activities all under local governmental control. In addition, although public transit receives state and federal funding, key decisions about transit capital investment and operations are made at the local level.

Furthermore our work in NYC finds that variation in residential neighborhood walkability is more strongly associated with physical activity than is variation in residential neighborhood access to parks.  Similarly we find that variation in neighborhood walkability is more strongly associated with body mass index than is variation in neighborhood access to healthy food outlets, fast food outlets and park spaces.

The Journal of Maps recently published our article showing a high resolution map of neighborhood physical disorder in New York City.

Physical disorder – the deterioration of urban spaces owing to social forces favoring neglect and abandonment – has long been of interest to social scientists [1, 2].  Criminologists and sociologists have debated the controversial ‘broken windows’ theory that disorder encourages violent crime [3, 4]. Separately, psychologists and psychiatric epidemiologists have investigated whether living amidst disorder negatively affects mental health, not only directly as stress induced by encountering a chaotic environment triggers earlier cognitive decline [5] but also indirectly as residents adopt coping mechanisms such as alcohol use that themselves trigger longer-term harms [6].

The data underlying the map was collected using neighborhood audits implemented via Street View. In addition to data collection in NYC, the team collected neighborhood physical disorder data from San Jose, California; Detroit, Michigan; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Below is a heat map of Philadelphia showing the distribution of neighborhood physical disorder across the city.

Neighborhood physical disorder in Philadelphia. Draker area within Philadelphia have higher levels of physical disorder.

The Mailman School blog reached out to Steve Mooney to discuss our research on pedestrian injuries.  The post shows a series of Street Views of the key features that were associated with injuries.  The article is Here. And an article in New Scientist. And on Forbes.com.

Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne at the University of Vermont just announced the release of a statewide, high-resolution tree canopy dataset for Pennsylvania.  The resolution of the data is 1 m which makes it 900 times more detailed than the National Land Cover Dataset; this is an amazing feat.

We previously worked with Jarlath to create tree canopy data for NYC and looked at the link between tree canopy coverage and asthma and allergic sensitization among children in NYC.

Tree canopy coverage in Washington Heights, NYC