The Population Health Initiative has announced the award of eight Tier 2 pilot grants, which are intended to encourage the development of new interdisciplinary collaborations among investigators – and with community-based partners – for projects that address critical challenges to population health. One of the funded projects, “Assessing National Public Housing Authority Disaster Preparedness, Response and Recovery of Place-based Subsidized Housing Units,” includes Rebecca Walter, Windermere Endowed Chair and Associate Professor, Runstad Department of Real Estate. Walter serves as a…
Research Theme: Safety & Health & Wellbeing
Scholarship on supporting human safety, health and well-being, from the individual, to built environment industries, to the region
Andy Dannenberg and co-editors publish an updated & expanded book on making healthy places
In Making Healthy Places, Second Edition: Designing and Building for Well-Being, Equity, and Sustainability, planning and public health experts, Andy L. Dannenberg, Affiliate Professor of Urban Design & Planning, along with co-authors Nisha D. Botchwey and Howard Frumkin bring together scholars and practitioners from across the globe in fields ranging from public health, planning, and urban design, to sustainability, social work, and public policy. This updated and expanded edition explains how to design and build places that are beneficial to the…
UW team including Rebecca Bachman, MLA awarded Population Health Grant
The University of Washington Population Health Initiative announced the award of 11 Tier 1 pilot grants to teams representing researchers from nine different UW schools and colleges as well as UW Tacoma and numerous community-based partners. The collective value of these 11 awards was nearly $480,000, which included approximately $270,000 in funding from the initiative plus additional school, college and departmental matching funds. Among the award recipients was a project titled “Amazonian Green Cities: A Gardens Program for Health Ecology and…
2022 CBE Inspire Fund awardees announced
In 2021 the College of Built Environments launched the CBE Inspire Fund, designed to support CBE research activities for which a relatively small amount of support can be transformative. The second year of awards have just been announced, supporting five projects across 4 departments within the college as they address topics such as food sovereignty, anti-displacement, affordable housing, and health & wellbeing. This year’s awardees include: Defining the New Diaspora: Where Seattle’s Black Church Congregants Are Moving and Why Rachel…
Daniel Winterbottom selected for Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellowship for Innovation & Leadership
Professor of Landscape Architecture, Daniel Winterbottom, RLA, FASLA has been selected for the 2022-2023 Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership. He will be investigating how landscape architecture can play a role in reducing the negative effects of incarceration. Each year, LAF selects 3-4 Fellows and 2-3 Olmsted Scholars for the LAF Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership, a year-long transformation program to develop ideas that have the potential to create positive and profound change in the profession, environment,…
The need for more equitable fare enforcement: An examination by Isis Moon Gamble, recent graduate of CBE’s Master of Urban Planning program
Though Transit Equity Day is just one day, the issue of equity on Seattle’s public transit is an ongoing and important conversation to Seattle and King County residents. Neighborhoods across the county have unequal access to transit lines; bus stops are often located in inconvenient or dangerous places due to oncoming traffic and lack of sidewalks; and bus schedules are irregular or sparse, with long wait times. These are just a few of the challenges folks might experience before getting…
Rebecca Habtour
Research Interests: Designing built environments to enhance human happiness, and related principles: Justice, Nature Integration, Access, Identity, Well-Being, Resiliency.
Amy Thorton
My research area is art and design for public health.
Through built investigations, illustration, photography, video, movement practices, narrative, the full-sensory experience of rural farming, community gatherings, and back country explorations, I explore the root cause for accelerating anthropogenic environmental destruction and human chronic disease: disconnection, divide, and lack of care.
I believe in order to address this challenge for human and planetary health and human to human reconnection, we must radically alter our methods of learning and communicating. I call on designers, artists, scientists, and the academy to eschew sensory-limiting, isolating, disembodied, sedentary, screen-based, occularcentric practices and employ full-sensory, embodied, and experiential modes of understanding, communication, and synthesizing. I believe that research and the communication of that research must also be experiential, full sensory, and embodied in order to grapple with the complex challenges with which we are faced. My work, therefore, explodes the confines of text and the occularcentric to include a multi-sensory, place-and-body based approach.
I am interested in empirical (or field study) design research and analysis. Implementing design and art installations which aim to inspire reconnections, I subsequently observe, document, collect informal, qualitative, and multi-sensory “data”, and communicate the outcomes through full-sensory experiential production which strives to provoke and engage the experiencer’s senses. Supporting this work, I deploy theoretical research based on intersectional feminism, indigenous knowledges, knowledge held by multi-species beings, and a canon (bibliography) of female and intersectional theorists.
My hope is to inspire and encourage reconnections to body, to natural environment, and to each other. My work is situated in the rural environment including its human and other-than-human community which has been largely neglected by academia and contemporary art. I enjoy trashing the anthropocentric concept of trans-urbanism and replacing it with trans-wilderness or trans-ruralism. Gastrointestinal microbes are from where?
Jonathan A. Childers
I am interested in environmental democracy and the material and social dynamics that interact to affect community well-being and ecological health. While completing my Master of Public Health degree at UW, I led projects for the Health Impact Assessment of the Cleanup Plan for the Duwamish Superfund Site in Seattle, and then evaluated the outcomes of that HIA. Research for my PhD in the Built Environment will build on that work, further considering the determinants and production of adaptive capacity, resilience, sustainability, and vitality.
Helen Beck
My research is focused on the management of public park and recreation services in urban areas. I am particularly interested in the role of the modern green space manager and the way in which our public park services are delivered in the face of extreme poverty. Public parks are on the frontline in our cities responding to complex social and environmental challenges. This role is likely to get more important in the future. Short-term, broken window styles of park management that try to control and sanitize park use are not sustainable. I am exploring the application of an ethic of care to the delivery of park services, what this could entail and how this would change current practice.