The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA

Abstract #39372

Jason Corburn, PhD, Urban Public Health, Hunter College, 425 E. 25th St. rm724west, New York, NY 10010, 212-481-5262, jcorburn@hunter.cuny.edu

While the disciplines of public health and urban planning emerged with the common goal of preventing urban outbreaks of infectious disease, little overlap between the fields exists today. The two fields once worked in synergy to create such visions as the Hygienic and Garden Cities but, as public health moved toward the biomedical model which emphasizes individualized physician care and urban planning toward technocratic risk analysis, the fields drifted apart. The separation of the fields has contributed to uncoordinated efforts to address health disparities and a failure to recognize the links between, for example, land use, transportation, housing and facility siting decisions with the health disparities facing low-income and people of color populations. This paper will suggest how insights from both social epidemiology, particularly ecosocial theory, and environmental justice present an opportunity to re-couple the fields of public health and urban planning. More specifically, I will highlight how the ecosocial approach and environmental justice are both fundamentally concerned with who and what drives current and changing patterns of social inequalities in health and environmental exposures. The paper will reveal that by combining insights from ecosocial theory that population distributions of health, disease and well being are biological expressions of social relations, and insights from environmental justice that community-based knowledge and local land-use decisions have both procedural and distributive equity implications - - the fields of public health and urban planning might be reconnected to address inequalities in health.

Learning Objectives:

• Review the historic connections and present disconnects between public health and urban planning.
• Describe the environmental, human health, and political implications of the disconnect between planning and public health.
• Highlight how ecosocial epidemiology and environmental justice have influenced their respective fields and have a similar approach towards understanding and eliminating inequalities in health.
• Describe the importance of reconnecting public health and urban planning in order to fulfill the goals of both ecosocial epidemiology and environmental justice.

Keywords: Environmental Justice, Social Inequalities

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.