Spatializing Health: Mapping, Representation, and the Built Environment

With Professor Sara Carr

Module Overview

This module considers how we can read histories of illness in the constructed environment. Our buildings, streets, parks, and homes all reflect the predominant health narratives of their time, and has implications for how we understand how places present opportunities for well-being and risks for disease. Additionally, geographies of health, and more specifically, their representation in maps, have both illuminated these complex pathways but in some cases also reinforced spatial biases.

The first week of the module introduces students to the intersecting histories of health, planning, and design, and how these ideas were supported by mapping and representational methodologies. The second week of the module utilizes active learning exercises to ask students to apply these histories in order to contextualize their own reflections on place and health, both on a personal level and when considering environmental design for vulnerable populations (children, elderly, and disabled).

Class 1: The Pandemic City in Context

Watch Intro to the Module

  • Corburn, Jason. “Reconnecting with our roots: American urban planning and public health in the twenty-first century.” Urban affairs review 42, no. 5 (2007): 688-713.
  • Szczygiel, Bonj, and Robert Hewitt. “Nineteenth-century medical landscapes: John H. Rauch, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the search for salubrity.” Bulletin of Anesthesia History 19, no. 2 (2001): 27-28.
  • Von Hoffman, Alexander. “High ambitions: The past and future of American low‐income housing policy.” Housing Policy Debate 7, no. 3 (1996): 423-446.
  • Carr, Sara Jensen. “Uncertain Space: Data Illusions and the Landscape of Illness in the 21st Century.” Projections (2020). https://doi.org/10.1162/00c13b77.a913ea43
  • Koch, Tom. “Mapping the miasma: Air, health, and place in early medical mapping.” Cartographic Perspectives 52 (2005): 4-27.

Watch Lecture: Spatializing Health

Fill out these questions and bring answers to class.

Class 2: Constructing Pre- and Post-Pandemic Cities

Before Class

Take a 15-minute walk (or “walk” for 15 minutes using Google Street View) around your neighborhood where you currently reside. Where can you identify some of the innovations in the built environment that were borne out of urban health crises? What elements of the built environment limit or encourage your personal mobility, i.e., how and where you travel? How do elements of the built environment impact your mental well-being? What are other ways you see how the surrounding environment impacts your health, mentally or physically? Has your perception of the environment changed after the readings, lecture and discussion this week? Make notes on your observations – sketches or photos are welcome as well – to bring to class. Spend the first 20 minutes of class sharing these observations with your group.

During Class: Activity

Many of our conceptions of a healthy environment are intuitive. Even if you are not an architect, landscape architect, or city planner, you probably have a sense of what supportive features are needed in specific spaces. In your group, decide if you want to design an example of a healthy park, school, street, or hospital garden.

Open this Google Slides document. Create a slide by copying the template on the second page and fill in the names of your group and type of place you are designing. What elements do you think are needed, and how do they relate to health? You can grab pictures off Google Image Search or similar, use words and arrows to relate them to each other as you discuss. As you put them on the page, think about groupings, categories, etc. You can see some example slides in the slideshow.

Note to Instructor: Keep these instructions hidden until groups have been working on their design for 15 minutes or so.

How might your design change if you had more information on context or population? Make a copy the slide you’ve been working on and consider how you might be design differently based on the following factors.

  • If you chose park, what would it look like if it was in an area with high crime?
  • If you chose school, what would it look like if it were an elementary school, designed to better mitigate COVID-19 spread?
  • If you chose street, what would it look like outside a senior center?
  • If you chose hospital garden, what might it look like for people in physical rehabilitation?

Final question for reflection:

Knowing a little bit more about how planners and designers have responded to past epidemics and pandemics, what kind of innovations or explorations would you prioritize for our own post-pandemic landscape?

Videos / Audio

1. The first video in this unit introduces students to ways of thinking the module offers. Specifically, it invites students to think about how the environment–particularly the built environment–can help or harm public health.

2. The second video offers a 30 minute lecture that takes students through the history of disease and public health as it helped shape the built environment over the last two centuries in the United States. It pays particular attention to the effects of epidemics in urban areas.

Introduction  to the Module

Spatializing Health

Readings

These articles give students an understanding of how scholars have thought about public health from foundational ideas about public health data gathering and visualization (see Koch, Szczgiel and Hewitt, and McLeod) through to contemporary forms of data gathering and representation (Corburn, Abrams, Carr, and Kwan).

  • Corburn, Jason. “Reconnecting with our roots: American urban planning and public health in the twenty-first century.” Urban affairs review 42, no. 5 (2007): 688-713.
  • Szczygiel, Bonj, and Robert Hewitt. “Nineteenth-century medical landscapes: John H. Rauch, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the search for salubrity.” Bulletin of Anesthesia History 19, no. 2 (2001): 27-28.
  • Keirns, Carla C. “Better than nature: the changing treatment of asthma and hay fever in the United States, 1910–1945.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 34, no. 3 (2003): 511-531.
  • Von Hoffman, Alexander. “High ambitions: The past and future of American low‐income housing policy.” Housing Policy Debate 7, no. 3 (1996): 423-446.
  • Koch, Tom. “Mapping the miasma: Air, health, and place in early medical mapping.” Cartographic Perspectives 52 (2005): 4-27.
  • McLeod, Kari S. “Our sense of Snow: the myth of John Snow in medical geography.” Social science & medicine 50, no. 7-8 (2000): 923-935.
  • Abrahams, Peter W. “Soil, geography and human disease: a critical review of the importance of medical cartography.” Progress in Physical Geography 30, no. 4 (2006): 490-512.
  • Carr, Sara Jensen. “Uncertain Space: Data Illusions and the Landscape of Illness in the 21st Century.” Projections (2020). https://doi.org/10.1162/00c13b77.a913ea43
  • Kwan, Mei-Po. “The Limits of the Neighborhood Effect: Contextual Uncertainties in Geographic, Environmental Health, and Social Science Research.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108, no. 6 (2018): 1482-490.