The Global ARC

Initiatives

Area of Concentration:

Built Environment & Health

The built environment includes urban and rural dwelling space, community facilities, roads, infrastructure and other physical-spatial arrangements needed for living, working and playing (e.g., shelter, mobility, commerce, recreation). The built environment ranges in scale from single buildings and small public spaces to neighborhoods and sprawling mega-regions tied into global flows of material, energy and knowledge resources. How we design, produce and maintain our built environment is crucial in our quest for sustainable development.

Healthy Communities Atlas: “Relationships between the built environment and health have influenced the development of human settlements since cities first came into existence.”

Read a Q&A with Dick Jackson, host of new PBS series “Designing Healthy Communities,” about the growing, sometimes fatal connection between our built environment and health.

Challenges
Global Outlook
Blog Posts
Action Research Status
Resources

Embrace1

By EMBRACE on March 13, 2011 at 07:56 PM

Why aren’t there more legal graffiti park in San Diego, in California, or in the nation as a whole?

By JVenegas on March 11, 2011 at 03:08 PM

Improving the Quality of Life for Low-Income Residents in City Heights

By chcdc on March 02, 2011 at 05:53 PM

NTC Foundation

By NTC Foundation on February 26, 2011 at 11:51 AM

Environmental public health, the built environment and planning

By Keith Pezzoli on September 08, 2010 at 10:53 PM

Planning and Decision Support Systems

By Keith Pezzoli on May 25, 2010 at 05:28 PM

Enviornmental health in vulnerable communities exposed to pollution

By Ashton on May 16, 2010 at 08:16 PM

Built Environment
The built environment is a material, spatial and cultural product of human labor that combines physical resources and energy in the form of buildings, roads, parks, towns, cities, infrastructure and other structures necessary for living, working and playing. The rapid growth of humanity’s built environment (and ecological footprint) has made our species a globally transformative force that undermines our prospects for a healthy and sustainable future. In the 21st Century, as more than half the world’s population is now urban, city-regions are becoming the dominant form of the built environment worldwide. City-regions are often conflicting, aggregations of cities, suburbs, and their rural hinterlands that need to be organized as integrated systems of networks and infrastructures. Yet globalization, uneven development and low-density urban sprawl have combined in ways that make traditional planning and policy approaches problematic. We need new approaches to planning and governance that can reconcile and coordinate the activities of regional planners, managers, politicians, industry and community groups in support of sustainability.

Challenges in this area include:

The greening of buildings (many buildings are energy gluttons with high carbon footprints; to learn more about the kind of research the NSF funds in this area, click here)
The greening of infrastructure (e.g., de-channelizing urban rivers by taking them out of their concrete liners)
Affordable housing and quality public space
Smart growth, industrial ecology and permaculture designs for sustainability
Impervious surfaces (paved streets, drive ways, parking lots) that negatively impact water supply, quality and flows
Urban heat island conditions found in treeless city enviornments with a lot of hot rooftops negatively impacting micro climates and energy consumption
Understanding the intersection between health, planning and the built environment

Transportation is an important element of the built environment. Transportation expenditures represent a major share of most household, business and government expenditures. Price structures can significantly affect financial burdens. Transportation planning decisions affect the location and type of development that occurs in an area, and therefore accessibility, land values and developer profits. A significant amount of valuable land is devoted to transportation facilities. This land is generally exempt from rent and taxes, representing an additional but hidden subsidy of transportation activity. Transportation investments are often used to stimulate economic development and support other strategic objectives. The location and nature of these investments have distributional impacts.

The following excepts from Frumkin (2005) highlight the intersection between health, planning and the built environment:

Frumkin, Howard. 2005. “Guest Editorial: Health, Equity, and the Built Environment.” Environ Health Perspect 113.

At least two paradigm shifts have revolutionized the [environmental health] field since Rachel Carson’s day. One occurred when environmental health encountered civil rights, forming the environmental justice movement. We are in the midst of the second, as environmental health reunites with architecture and urban planning.

The environmental justice movement coalesced around 1982, when a predominantly African? American community in Warren County, North Carolina, challenged a proposed polychlorinated biphenyl landfill as an act of “environmental racism” (Lee 1992). Early research by sociologist Robert Bullard (1983) found that hazardous waste sites were disproportionately located in African?American communities. Subsequent research documented racial disparities in other hazardous exposures such as industrial plants and bus depots (Bryant and Mohai 1992;Bullard 1990) and even in the enforcement of environmental laws (Lavelle and Coyle 1992). The environmental justice movement has had a profound effect on environmentalism and on environmental health. It has focused attention on the needs of disenfranchised populations, especially poor people and people of color. In documenting that environmental hazards may target vulnerable populations, it helped draw attention to children, the elderly, people with disabilities, and other groups. It asserted a central role for community perspectives and placed grass?roots leadership at the heart of environmental health advocacy.

A second paradigm shift in environmental health has occurred in recent years: a broadening of focus from the chemical environment to the built environment. Many factors have contributed to this shift. Architectural changes following the oil shocks of the 1970s, especially the construction of “tight buildings,” were found to have health consequences. Rapid urbanization around the world and the sprawling expansion of cities in the United States (Frumkin et al. 2004) gave new meaning—and urgency—to the idea of “urban health.” The obesity epidemic in developed nations called attention to land use and transportation as determinants of physical activity (Saelens et al. 2003). The development of geographic information systems (GIS) facilitated spatial analysis of health problems. Because of these and other factors, environmental health is rediscovering its roots in geography and urban planning (Barton and Tsourou 2000;Corburn 2004).

Also see: Tibbetts, John. (2002, November 1). Building awareness of the built environment. (NIEHS News) The Free Library. (2002). Retrieved December 03, 2010 from http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Building
awareness of the built environment. (NIEHS News).?a095527017
,

,,the poor, who often live in inadequate housing, suffer from worse health than more prosperous people, including greater infant mortality, more birth defects, higher cancer rates, and a higher incidence of asthma, diabetes, andcardiovascular disease. Researchers have gathered increasing evidence that the poor endure a disproportionate share of exposure to lead, air pollutants, and other contaminants in the built environment.