Smith, Hajat, Hurvitz, and Hamilton Receive NIH Funding to Study Role of Racism in Urban Planning Policies and Practices
Posted: 10/31/2022 (CSDE Research)
CSDE Affiliates Jessica Jones-Smith and Anjum Hajat, along with CSDE Research Scientists Phil Hurvitz and Deven Hamilton, received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIMHD) to study the role of racism in urban planning policies and practices in creating inequitable neighborhood food environments and disparities in body mass index levels. The project is a collaboration with investigators at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (Yeeli Mui,Keshia Pollack Porter and Julia Wolfson).
The project will use a mixed methods design to investigate the role of structural racism vis-à-vis historical racialized policies and urban planning decisions on current day inequitable neighborhood and food environments and BMI disparities. We will examine the historical and contemporary sociopolitical context of these three racialized policies through interviews, document and media reviews, and test the feasibility of linking newly compiled spatial and contextual urban planning and policy data with the Multi-ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) cohort, which contains in-depth, longitudinal health data for people who were initially recruited from six cities.
NIH Grant details are available at NIH RePORTER.