Resilience: Looking Back to the Local

The neighborhoods where we live impact our chances to live healthy lives. In citiesacross the globe the distribution of resources and the quality of our built environments,public spaces and neighborhoods are not equal. The socio-economiccontext of our neighborhoods—income, housing, education, and employment—ismore often than not directly correlated to the health of the people that call themhome. Some neighborhoods have plentiful fresh food options while others arefood deserts, some neighborhoods have well maintained parks while others donot, and some neighborhoods thrive while others decline.This paper presents the research, analysis, collaborations, and interventions thatwere developed over the course of nearly two years of study and in partnershipwith the Department of Health and Human Services and over a hundred residentsand stakeholders in four neighborhoods. The project had two goals, first to identifythe determinants of health that can be impacted by community design; andsecond to explore the role of small-scale, low-budget design interventions withthe potential to create big change.Seven strategies for building healthy communities were developed that directlylink the quality of the built environment, design and health: education, economicopportunity, safety, public space and amenities, neighborhood stability, food security,and environmental justice. The strategies are based on a “thick” investigationof the conditions in the studied neighborhoods–for example the relationshipamong educational attainment, median household income, and obesity rates—and a further analysis of systemic connections.We found that parks and open spaces, bike infrastructure, and community centerswere important indicators of health. Access to healthy food, or food security, isequally important. We looked at new single family housing permits to understandlocations of and constraints to new development in our four neighborhoods andacross the city. We proposed joint-use schools as a means to expand services forchildren and families, increase opportunities for physical activity and healthy living,and provide additional educational, cultural, and civic uses by capitalizing onexisting built environments. We created a networked plan for public space utilizingutility easements and right-of-ways to connect all of the primary destinations inthe neighborhoods, increase neighborhood stability, and greatly increase physicalactivity. Overall, we looked at the interconnectedness of both the existing conditionsand opportunities for neighborhood transformation, working to developsynergies between the seven strategies, and across the interventions.As a means to support community-led transformation and smaller scale projectswe are also developing a healthy action project toolkit—a series of scalable designprojects that can be implemented in other neighborhoods and other cities. Thesesmaller projects require minimal infrastructure or investment and have a clear impacton the health of a community and its citizens. As more and more resourcesare expended on addressing individual health problems instead of understandinghow the larger environment effects our health, this project is one example ofworking proactively to ensure that all of our communities and the people who callthem home have an opportunity to be healthy.

Volume Editors
Alice Kimm & Jaepil Choi

ISBN
978-0-935502-91-6