Includes urban horticulture/agriculture, and cultures/systems of food.
Aquaponics OPTI: sustainable food production
Sustainable food production depends on the recovery of water, energy, and nutrients from waste streams within existing supply chains. Greenhouse hydroponic systems (HYP) and recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) are two intensive food production systems that in combined production as an aquaponics system (AP) can utilize fish wastes as fertilizers, while recycling water and energy to increase both systems’ sustainability and efficiency.
Associate Professor of Architecture Gundula Proksch has been awarded the ARCC Mid-Career Research Impact Award, which recognizes outstanding performance and substantive impact in architectural research. Awardees are selected by the ARCC Board. Associate Professor Proksch’s NSF project CITYFOOD is mentioned in her recognition, as well as her book “Creating Urban Agricultural Systems: An Integrated Approach to Design” (Routledge, 2016). See the announcement story here.
Sun, F., Whittington, J., Ning, S., Proksch, G., Shen, Q., & Dermisi, S. (2023). Economic resilience during COVID-19: the case of food retail businesses in Seattle, Washington. Frontiers in Built Environment, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbuil.2023.1212244
The first year of COVID-19 tested the economic resilience of cities, calling into question the viability of density and the essential nature of certain types of services. This study examines built environment and socio-economic factors associated with the closure of customer-facing food businesses across urban areas of Seattle, Washington. The study covers 16 neighborhoods (44 census block groups), with two field audits of businesses included in cross-sectional studies conducted during the peak periods of the pandemic in 2020. Variables describing businesses and their built environments were selected and classified using regression tree methods, with relationships to business continuity estimated in a binomial regression model, using business type and neighborhood socio-demographic characteristics as controlled covariates. Results show that the economic impact of the pandemic was not evenly distributed across the built environment. Compared to grocery stores, the odds of a restaurant staying open during May and June were 24%, only improving 10% by the end of 2020. Density played a role in business closure, though this role differed over time. In May and June, food retail businesses were 82% less likely to remain open if located within a quarter-mile radius of the office-rich areas of the city, where pre-pandemic job density was greater than 95 per acre. In November and December, food retail businesses were 66% less likely to remain open if located in areas of residential density greater than 23.6 persons per acre. In contrast, median household income and percentage of non-Asian persons of color were positively and significantly associated with business continuity. Altogether, these findings provide more detailed and accurate profiles of food retail businesses and a more complete impression of the spatial heterogeneity of urban economic resilience during the pandemic, with implications for future urban planning and real estate development in the post-pandemic era.
Lovasi, G. S., Boise, S., Jogi, S., Hurvitz, P. M., Rundle, A. G., Diez, J., Hirsch, J. A., Fitzpatrick, A., Biggs, M. L., & Siscovick, D. S. (2023). Time-Varying Food Retail and Incident Disease in the Cardiovascular Health Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 64(6), 877–887. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2023.02.001
Cowling, Krycia; Lindberg, Ruth; Dannenberg, Andrew L.; Neff, Roni A.; Pollack, Keshia M. (2017). Review of Health Impact Assessments Informing Agriculture, Food, and Nutrition Policies, Programs, and Projects in the United States. Journal Of Agriculture Food Systems And Community Development, 7(3), 139 – 157.
Policies, programs, and projects related to agriculture, food, and nutrition can significantly affect public health. Health impact assessment (HIA) is one tool that can be used to improve awareness of the health effects of decisions outside the health sector, and increasing the use of HIA for agriculture, food, and nutrition decisions presents an opportunity to improve public health. This study identifies and reviews all HIAs completed in the United States on agriculture, food, and nutrition topics. Studies were identified from HIA databases, an Internet search, and expert consultation. Key characteristics were extracted from each study: type of decision assessed, location, level of jurisdiction, lead organization, methods of analysis, and recommendations. Twenty-five eligible HIAs that were conducted between 2007 and 2016 address topics such as regulations on land use for agriculture; food and beverage taxes; and developing grocery stores in food deserts. These HIAs have predominantly supported policy, as opposed to program or project, decisions. Four case studies are presented to illustrate in detail the HIA process and the mechanisms through which HIA findings affected policy decisions. Among other influences, these four HIAs affected the language of legislation and provided guidance for federal regulations. These examples demonstrate several findings: appropriate timing is critical for findings to have an influence; diverse stakeholder involvement generates support for recommendations; and the clear communication of feasible recommendations is highly important. There is substantial scope to increase the use of HIA in the agriculture, food, and nutrition sectors. Challenges include the paucity of monitoring and evaluation of HIAs' effects on health outcomes, and the limited funding available to conduct HIAs. Opportunities include integrating HIAs and community food assessments, and more widely sharing HIA findings to inform related decisions in different jurisdictions and to increase support for additional HIAs that address the food system.
Environments; Obesity; Health Impact Assessment; Policy; Food; Nutrition; Agriculture
Purcell, Mark; Born, Branden. (2017). Planning in the Spirit of Deleuze and Guattari? Considering Community-Based Food Projects in the United States and Mexico. Urban Geography, 38(4), 521 – 536.
In this article we argue that planning theory and practice should engage more with the normative political vision of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. They reject the transcendent authority of the State and arguably by extension, planning. As planners we should be concerned: need we reconceptualize, or abandon the planning project? We outline their vision, highlighting key concepts including lines of flight, revolution, the new land, and immanent organization, and use two cases from the United States and Mexico, the Food Commons and Center for Integral Farmer Development in the Mixteca, to show that planning in accordance with Deleuze and Guattari may indeed be possible. We end with questions: is what we describe planning? And what is planning - or what should it be?
Deleuze And Guattari; Planning Theory; Mexico; Food Systems
Scully, Jason Y.; Moudon, Anne Vernez; Hurvitz, Philip M.; Aggarwal, Anju; Drewnowski, Adam. (2017). GPS or Travel Diary: Comparing Spatial and Temporal Characteristics of Visits to Fast Food Restaurants and Supermarkets. Plos One, 12(4).
To assess differences between GPS and self-reported measures of location, we examined visits to fast food restaurants and supermarkets using a spatiotemporal framework. Data came from 446 participants who responded to a survey, filled out travel diaries of places visited, and wore a GPS receiver for seven consecutive days. Provided by Public Health Seattle King County, addresses from food permit data were matched to King County tax assessor parcels in a GIS. A three-step process was used to verify travel-diary reported visits using GPS records: (1) GPS records were temporally matched if their timestamps were within the time window created by the arrival and departure times reported in the travel diary; (2) the temporally matched GPS records were then spatially matched if they were located in a food establishment parcel of the same type reported in the diary; (3) the travel diary visit was then GPS-sensed if the name of food establishment in the parcel matched the one reported in the travel diary. To account for errors in reporting arrival and departure times, GPS records were temporally matched to three time windows: the exact time, +/-10 minutes, and +/-30 minutes. One third of the participants reported 273 visits to fast food restaurants; 88% reported 1,102 visits to supermarkets. Of these, 77.3 percent of the fast food and 78.6 percent supermarket visits were GPS-sensed using the +/-10-minute time window. At this time window, the mean travel-diary reported fast food visit duration was 14.5 minutes (SD 20.2), 1.7 minutes longer than the GPS-sensed visit. For supermarkets, the reported visit duration was 23.7 minutes (SD 18.9), 3.4 minutes longer than the GPS-sensed visit. Travel diaries provide reasonably accurate information on the locations and brand names of fast food restaurants and supermarkets participants report visiting.
Global Positioning System; Fast Food Restaurants; Self-evaluation; Public Health; Supermarkets; Geoinformatics; Comparative Studies; Biology And Life Sciences; Computer And Information Sciences; Diet; Earth Sciences; Eating; Engineering And Technology; Food; Food Consumption; Geographic Information Systems; Geography; Medicine And Health Sciences; Nutrition; Physiological Processes; Physiology; Public And Occupational Health; Research And Analysis Methods; Research Article; Research Design; Survey Research; Surveys; Transportation; Global Positioning Systems; Environment; Neighborhood; Exposure; Health; Consumption; Tracking; Adults; Associations; Dietary
Mooney, Stephen J.; Lemaitre, Rozenn N.; Siscovick, David S.; Hurvitz, Philip; Goh, Charlene E.; Kaufman, Tanya K.; Zulaika, Garazi; Sheehan, Daniel M.; Sotoodehnia, Nona; Lovasi, Gina S. (2018). Neighborhood Food Environment, Dietary Fatty Acid Biomarkers, and Cardiac Arrest Risk. Health & Place, 53, 128 – 134.
We explored links between food environments, dietary intake biomarkers, and sudden cardiac arrest in a population-based longitudinal study using cases and controls accruing between 1990 and 2010 in King County, WA. Surprisingly, presence of more unhealthy food sources near home was associated with a lower 18:1 trans-fatty acid concentration ( - 0.05% per standard deviation higher count of unhealthy food sources, 95% Confidence Interval [CI]: 0.01, 0.09). However, presence of more unhealthy food sources was associated with higher odds of cardiac arrest (Odds Ratio [OR]: 2.29, 95% CI: 1.19, 4.41 per standard deviation in unhealthy food outlets). While unhealthy food outlets were associated with higher cardiac arrest risk, circulating 18:1 trans fats did not explain the association.
Fatty Acids; Biological Tags; Cardiac Arrest; Food Contamination; Standard Deviations; Food Supply; Out-of-hospital Cardiac Arrest; Residence Characteristics; Sudden Cardiac Death; Trans Fatty Acids; New-york-city; Acute Myocardial-infarction; Low Socioeconomic-status; United-states; Vascular Inflammation; Cardiovascular Health; Older-adults; Death; Epidemiology; Arrhythmias; Dietary Supplements; Biomarkers; Heart Attacks; Risk Factors; Diet; Heart; Healthy Food; Fats; Dietary Intake; Food Sources; Food; Confidence Intervals; Biological Markers; Myocardial Infarction; Population Studies; Food Intake; Correlation Analysis; Neighborhoods
Drewnowski, A.; Arterburn, D.; Zane, J.; Aggarwal, A.; Gupta, S.; Hurvitz, P. M.; Moudon, A., V; Bobb, J.; Cook, A.; Lozano, P.; Rosenberg, D. (2019). The Moving to Health (M2H) Approach to Natural Experiment Research: A Paradigm Shift for Studies on Built Environment and Health. Ssm-population Health, 7.
Improving the built environment (BE) is viewed as one strategy to improve community diets and health. The present goal is to review the literature on the effects of BE on health, highlight its limitations, and explore the growing use of natural experiments in BE research, such as the advent of new supermarkets, revitalized parks, or new transportation systems. Based on recent studies on movers, a paradigm shift in built-environment health research may be imminent. Following the classic Moving to Opportunity study in the US, the present Moving to Health (M2H) strategy takes advantage of the fact that changing residential location can entail overnight changes in multiple BE variables. The necessary conditions for applying the M2H strategy to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) databases and to large longitudinal cohorts are outlined below. Also outlined are significant limitations of this approach, including the use of electronic medical records in lieu of survey data. The key research question is whether documented changes in BE exposure can be linked to changes in health outcomes in a causal manner. The use of geo-localized clinical information from regional health care systems should permit new insights into the social and environmental determinants of health.
Body-mass Index; Neighborhood Food Environment; Residential Property-values; Cardiometabolic Risk-factors; New-york-city; Physical-activity; Obesity Rates; King County; Weight-gain; Land-use; Built Environment (be); Geographic Information Systems (gis); Electronic Medical Records; Natural Experiments; Obesity; Diabetes; Residential Mobility
Scully, Jason Y.; Moudon, Anne Vernez; Hurvitz, Philip M.; Aggarwal, Anju; Drewnowski, Adam. (2019). A Time-Based Objective Measure of Exposure to the Food Environment. International Journal Of Environmental Research And Public Health, 16(7).
Exposure to food environments has mainly been limited to counting food outlets near participants' homes. This study considers food environment exposures in time and space using global positioning systems (GPS) records and fast food restaurants (FFRs) as the environment of interest. Data came from 412 participants (median participant age of 45) in the Seattle Obesity Study II who completed a survey, wore GPS receivers, and filled out travel logs for seven days. FFR locations were obtained from Public Health Seattle King County and geocoded. Exposure was conceptualized as contact between stressors (FFRs) and receptors (participants' mobility records from GPS data) using four proximities: 21 m, 100 m, 500 m, and 1/2 mile. Measures included count of proximal FFRs, time duration in proximity to 1 FFR, and time duration in proximity to FFRs weighted by FFR counts. Self-reported exposures (FFR visits) were excluded from these measures. Logistic regressions tested associations between one or more reported FFR visits and the three exposure measures at the four proximities. Time spent in proximity to an FFR was associated with significantly higher odds of FFR visits at all proximities. Weighted duration also showed positive associations with FFR visits at 21-m and 100-m proximities. FFR counts were not associated with FFR visits. Duration of exposure helps measure the relationship between the food environment, mobility patterns, and health behaviors. The stronger associations between exposure and outcome found at closer proximities (<100 m) need further research.
Global Positioning Systems; Physical-activity; Health Research; Land-use; Neighborhood; Gps; Obesity; Tracking; Validity; Mobility; Fast Food; Spatio-temporal Exposure; Mobility Patterns; Selective Mobility Bias