Presenters:
Jay Campanell
University of Southern California
The urban built environment, encompassing man-made infrastructure, configurations, and facilities, plays a critical role in shaping population health outcomes through its influence on daily activities, lifestyle, and environmental exposures. However, the complexity and time-consuming nature of measuring the built environment across multiple dimensions has limited its integration into environmental health studies. This research aims to develop a comprehensive open-source geodatabase quantifying the urban built environment in Los Angeles County using a repeatable, replicable, and reproducible (RRR) workflow. Guided by the Social Ecological Theory and the 5D conceptual framework—Design, Density, Diversity, Distance, and Destination—this study will integrate diverse datasets, including land use data from Open Street Maps, remote sensing imagery from Google Earth Engine, and road network data from governmental sources. Developing a workflow that can be applied to any municipality is crucial and will allow for built environment factors to be integrated into more analyses run in public health studies, adding more dimensionality to understanding health outcomes across the United States.
