Health

RESEARCH OVERVIEW

The Sustainable Healthy Cities network understands infrastructure-related health risk as the risks and hazards posed to people and to the economy of urban areas due to infrastructure-environment interactions across scale. Such risks and hazards can include inadequate or polluting infrastructure, climate extremes, and supply chain risks resulting in water, food, and electricity shortages.

While infrastructure and resource use patterns that infrastructure systems shape are a key determinant shaping health outcomes, there are also key social system factors that mediate health outcomes related to morbidity, mortality and sense of happiness. For example, among populations exposed to similar levels of a hazard (e.g. similar air pollution levels or heat stress), existing social vulnerabilities can lead to disproportionately high negative health outcomes from infrastructure related hazard or risk. Socially vulnerable populations that may experience increased exposure to infrastructure related health risk include the poor, the elderly, immigrants who may lack information or medical resources, those with prior diseases such as asthma, or those living in homes lacking electricity or adequate cooling sources.

The network’s research efforts seek to better understand the health outcomes associated with socially mediated infrastructure-environment interactions across scales and how questions of distribution and localization affect those outcomes.