Built Urban Environments, Obesity and Environmental Justice

Description:
Obesity is a growing public health threat. Those most at risk in Phoenix, like most parts of the U.S., are low income and minorities. An environmental justice approach, concerned with explicating the relationships between the distribution of environmental amenities and disamenities and social disadvantage, provides a way to think through health disparities we observe on the ground to the broader political-economic structures that create and reinforce them. This project is particularly concerned with how structural discrimination in how our cities are laid out and managed explains who is most at risk of obesity and related conditions (such as diabetes). We are focused on two aspects of the built environment that are “toxic” for creating obesity and common in inner cities, especially in high minority areas: poor food environments (too few accessible healthy food stores, too many junk food outlets and excessive child-focused advertising) and poor exercise environments (unwalkable streets, insufficient green spaces).

We are using a wide range of methods to investigate the situation in South Phoenix, an area of the city with low income households, many of them Mexican American. We are also looking at higher incomes areas in Phoenix as a comparison. Our methods include spatial analysis of bioinformatic data (such as diagnoses), ground-truthed geographic analyses of neighborhood walkability and park access, characterization of food environments through surveys of stores, restaurants and urban agriculture, and household-based studies of how all these factors are influencing what people eat and how often they exercise.