Jason Corburn, PhD, Urban Public Health, Hunter College, 425 e. 25th St. rm 724west, New York, NY 10010, 212-481-5262, jcorburn@hunter.cuny.edu

Recent efforts aimed at reconnecting the built environment and public health have failed to meaningfully incorporate the concerns of the poor and people of color and, more generally, learn from the environmental justice (EJ) movement. For example, insights from the EJ movement could help ensure that built environment research and interventions make addressing disease disparities a top priority. This paper offers both a conceptual model and empirical examples of how the built environment and public health can incorporate the principles of EJ. Specifically, the paper highlights how current efforts to reconnect the built environment and public health, such as Smart Growth and Health Impact Assessment, have failed to meaningfully incorporate EJ principals into their work. The paper offers a methodology for addressing the relationship of the built environment and health disparities, by combining community-based participatory research strategies with analytic and forecasting methods using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Finally, the paper reveals how this process can be employed in practice through two case studies. The first explores how a community-based organization is linking the built environment and disparities in asthma morbidity in Harlem, New York City. The second case study highlights how a coalition of community organizations have performed an EJ analysis including the social determinants of health for a rezoning master plan in the Mission District of San Francisco. The paper concludes with specific research and policy recommendations for ensuring insights from EJ are incorporated into research and interventions around the built environment and health.

Learning Objectives:

• Highlight how the principals of EJ are not routinely incorporated into analyses of the built environment and health and why this presents a key flaw in the field.
• Offer a conceptual model for addressing health disparities in research and interventions around the built environment and health
• Highlight how participatory research methods and GIS can be used to incorporate EJ into health analyses of the built environment.
• Reveal the lesson from case studies of community based organizations that are already incorporating EJ into analyses and interventions over the built environment and health.
• Suggest specific research and policy recommendations to link EJ and the built environment.

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.