Doctoral Student University of California-Los Angeles, United States
Urban planning and health share a bidirectional relationship that is often mediated through elements of the built environment. In the early 20th century, increasing concerns over sanitation and infectious disease in US cities led city planners and social reformers to address poor public health practices and outcomes through zoning and land use. Cities used these tools to segregate land uses and corresponding typologies in the name of protecting the health, safety and general welfare of communities. This included separation of land uses deemed incompatible (e.g., industrial from residential) and the establishment of building development standards that improved ventilation and access to light. Despite this ostensibly noble beginning, these planning mechanisms were also used to justify practices of exclusionary zoning, expulsive zoning and residential segregation. These systemic biases ultimately shaped urban patterns that historically and currently disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities. In short, a city’s particular land use and zoning policies and practices can manifest in uneven urban social-ecological landscapes and consequentially impact the health of urban residents and ecosystems.
This panel is the first of a two-part panel presentation that explores the interplay of land use and zoning, housing, health and justice in three California cities - Culver City, Huntington Park, and Lynwood. The broad aim of this study is to explore whether a jurisdiction’s Housing Element and supplementary planning practices remedy, ignore, or exacerbate public health disparities. In this presentation, we will focus on contextualizing each jurisdictional case study through an exploration of underlying systemic biases that produce uneven attributes in each city’s urban landscape, and the study’s methodological process. The qualitative methodological approach included a rigorous review of the peer-reviewed and gray literature which allowed for an assessment of the generalizable ways in which land use and zoning impacts health. Second, the review informed the development of an analytical code matrix (“code matrix”), which isolated the individual ways in which zoning and land use mechanisms can impact health. Coding was validated by having at least two independent reviews of each Housing Element, with the goal of reaching a 90% inter-coder consistency. Remaining coding discrepancies were resolved through discussion of differences.
