What’s this about?
The Built Environment & Health (BEH) project is an interdisciplinary program of research at Columbia University. Led by epidemiologist Andrew Rundle, BEH uses spatial data to examine the implications of the built environment, including land use, public transit, and housing, for physical activity, diet, obesity, and other aspects of health. With a focus on New York City, BEH research will inform public policy to promote health in the city and metropolitan area. BEH is affiliated with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars program at Columbia.
Measuring Urban Design in New York City
Active Living Research Grant
Urban planners and architects have long believed that aesthetic features of the urban environment encourage people to walk. It has been difficult to study this question, however, because we haven’t had good measures of urban design qualities such as imageability and enclosure. A new two-pronged project is developing new measures of urban design for New York City. A team of fieldworkers is coding urban design qualities for a sample of 600 blocks using a protocol developed earlier by a team at the University of Maryland. At the same time, project staff are developing ‘digital’ measures of urban design for New York City using data from the Department of City Planning as well as other city and nonprofit agencies. If the fieldwork-based and digital measures match up well, we will construct the digital measures for the entire city and use them in our research linking the built environment with physical activity and obesity.
The project, “Observational Validation of Urban Design Measures for New York City,” is led by Andrew Rundle. Other participants include Kathryn Neckerman, Marnie Purciel, James Quinn, and Christopher Weiss. The project is being advised by Reid Ewing, who led the University of Maryland project. Both projects were funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Active Living Research program.
The BEH research was featured in the summer 2006 issue of Health & Society News.
