This project will study an established community activity, community gardening, for its potential to promote public health through increased physical activity, nutrition, social engagement and cognitive stimulation with the long-term public health goals of disease prevention and health promotion.
The goal of this project is to empower residents and build capacity for neighborhood-level sustainable environmental change in northeast Denver neighborhoods where residents suffer from a combination of environmental inequities. These include excess burden of chemical pollution to inequitable distribution of amenities and services such as safe and healthy food, homes, streets, schools, as well as inadequate attention to land use and design regulations that may exacerbate or fail to remedy such inequities.
The research project will incorporate methods of ethnography, epidemiology, social network analysis, behavioral ecology and geographic information systems technology to understand the impact of the physical environment in neighborhoods on the health of families, children and youth in one of Colorado's oldest industrial and ethnically and economically diverse areas. The research will employ collaborative techniques to promote training and intellectual exchange between the researchers, university students and youth in the affected communities.
Contributions of Fahriye Sancar and the CYE Center will include applying the knowledge and know-how in the fields of environmental psychology, urban planning, and community design to profile neighborhood assets and liabilities, mapping neighborhood places, train youth to identify and describe behavior settings, identify and map issues, develop appropriate planning and design interventions and conduct participatory evaluation of the outcomes.
Conducted in collaboration with CUHSC Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine. Funded by Department of Health and Human Services (2004-2007).