Built Environment and Health Research Group

Today the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the AIA Foundation, and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), named Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation as charter members of the AIA Design & Health Research Consortium, which will help fund basic research on how design affects public health (see the press release here and the Scientific American article here).  In September we teamed up with our friends Hilary Sample, Associate Professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and Dr. Karen Lee, who while at NYC DOHMH helped create NYC’s Active Design Guidelines, to submit a proposal to AIA’s Call for Qualifications and we were selected to join the consortium.

As part of the Consortium we will focus our research and translation activities on physical activity and identifying the ways in which architecture and urban design create built environments that support physically active lifestyles. While physical activity prevents cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and reduces blood pressure less than 50% of Americans meet current recommendations for activity.  The team will use GPS and GIS technologies to study how neighborhood built environments can support physical activity among residents of New York City and will develop methods to conduct similar research in Rio das Pedras, a favela community in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.   Our choice of research sites is motivated by two key UN projections: (1) by 2025, 379 million people are expected to live in megacities such as New York City and (2) by 2030, 2 billion people will live in “informal communities” such as Rio das Pedras.

Latino USA, which is broadcast on NPR, did a story about our research findings on Hispanic immigrant women’s perspectives on healthy food and local neighborhood food access.  Our research used in-depth, hour long interviews to gather data on these women’s perspectives on healthy food and where they preferred to buy their food.  They generally reported being skeptical of the quality, freshness and flavor of produce and meat purchased in supermarkets and reported that even though the prices were higher, they preferred to buy produce and meat at farmer’s markets and small, local slaughter houses. They felt that these retail outlets provided food that more closely matched their values and preferences for food.  When we did a spatial analyses for a larger sample of Hispanic immigrant women, we found that having a farmer’s market in their residential neighborhood was associated with significantly higher consumption of fruit and vegetables.  Furthermore we found that having a farmer’s market and/or a small slaughter house in their neighborhood was associated with significantly higher consumption of meat.  Having local access to a supermarket was not associated with any of the measured dietary outcomes.

The Latino USA story can be heard here and the original research paper is here.

A lot of us in the neighborhood health effects field create or use neighborhood contextual measures that are aggregations of population data from the Census or other large social surveys. For instance, common measures of neighborhood level socio-economic status, such as poverty rate, per capita income, and median household income, are all derived from Census data on individual respondents’ self-reported household income. Our recent work has asked the question: what is the effect on our estimates of association between a neighborhood level socioeconomic variable and an individual level health outcome when the individual self-reports on income to the Census include random measurement error? Continue reading →

Preventive Medicine just published our paper on neighborhood park access and BMI among residents of New York City.  These analyses were part of our ongoing work the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to analyze their health surveillance data in conjunction with measures of neighborhood context.  In this report we showed that higher neighborhood park access and the quality of those parks (extent to which parks were free of graffiti, litter, trash and broken glass) were associated with lower BMI scores among residents.  This report also showed that higher neighborhood walkability was associated with lower BMI, while neighborhood poverty and homicide rates were associated with higher BMI for residents.

The graph below plots, after adjustment for differences in survey respondent’s socio-demographic characteristics, the difference in BMI, and the 95% confidence interval, associated with differences equivalent to the inter-quartile range in neighborhood conditions across NYC zip codes.

Andrew Rundle presented recent work by BEH on food environments in New York City at the New York City Food Policy Center at Hunter College’s event “Food Policy for Breakfast: Food Policy Research in NYC- What do we know? Where do we need to go?”.  Hunter College posted video from the event to YouTube, including Dr. Rundle’s talk and the group Q&A and discussion.

Q&A and Discussion part 1

Q&A and Discussion part 2