Healthy City Maps: Public Health

Showing posts with label Public Health. Show all posts

OPPI Ignite Session Presentation Slides

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to present the results of my Masters Research Project (MRP) at the Ontario Professional Planning Institute (OPPI) Annual Symposium in Hamilton Ontario. You can view a video of my presentation here:

You may also click the image below to download the slides from my 'Ignite Session' presentation, and tweet @HealthyCityMaps or use the comment box below if you have any questions or comments.

Photos from PWL Partnership

This presentation provides an introduction to a new community park that is generally referred to as Hinge Park, although has not been formally named by the Vancouver Parks Board. This park is located next to the 2010 Olympic Athletes Village, or what is now known as the Southeast False Creek Neighbourhood. Overall this park is a wonderful example of a master planned site that provides unique elements for play and relaxation.

The presentation includes a unique site tour created using Google Earth Pro, and it describes the park design elements and how they support the broader design goals of the community. There is also discussion of the artificial habitat island (or beer island as it is often called), the planning policies of the city that are supported by this project. The presentation also describes the Seven Cs, an evidence-based framework for evaluating the quality of natural outdoor play spaces for children. Several lessons for the City of Toronto are also suggested.

This presentation was delivered in an urban park planning class in the Master of Urban Planning program at Ryerson University in Toronto.

The following slide summarizes my own personal evaluation of this space:

Healthy Built Environment Indicators of Community Wellbeing

I am currently working with DIALOG Design in Vancouver to create a new tool to measure how community wellbeing may be increased through evidence-based urban design, land use and transportation decisions. This decision support tool uses a Geographic Information System (GIS) to evaluate ten themes of healthy built environment indicators. Each indicator includes several sub-components such access to a grocery store or community center, access to a protected cycletrack or frequent transit network, and the total area of public parks and natural forest area per capita.

Each indicator is also linked through peer-reviewed literature to physical, social, mental and spiritual, financial, and ecological health outcomes. Results from this tool will be presented along with specific thresholds for each indicator to ensure results can be easily translated into real world impacts that can inform healthy planning decisions.

I am sharing this early draft to collect feedback on the content and wording. What do you like, what would you change? what do you think is missing? Please share your observations in the comment section below. I look forward to sharing much more of this work over the next six months as I develop this work into my masters research project.

Seven Years of Cartography

This year will mark my 7th year as a professional cartographer. I am full of gratitude for every hour I have spent creating, and still love the meditative, balanced practice that forms the art and science of designing maps. The following two videos encapsulate a selection of my knowledge and practice to date and I hope these learnings may benefit my fellow spatial analysts, cartographers, designers, creators or anyone who wants to make the world a better place for future generations. If you only watch one, I suggest you watch the second video about walkability as I think it captures my current thinking very well while the longer lecture includes more specific design advice for aspiring mapmakers.

20 Best Maps of 2014

Happy new year! In this post I have summarized my 20 favourite mapping projects from 2014. This has been an exciting year for me! I was promoted in my role at Golder Associates, working as a GIS Analyst and Cartographer on urban and environmental planning projects; however, I resigned in august and moved to Toronto to begin my Masters in Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University. I have continued to produce maps for this blog in my spare time using open data and I was recently hired to create maps for Dr. Richard Florida at the U of T Martin Prosperity Institute. I already have some exciting ideas for 2015, so consider subscribing to this blog to see more cool maps in the future!

Vancouver Property Values

Metro Vancouver Commuter Challenge Trips

Comparative Study of Bicycle Infrastructure

Population Density in Metro Vancouver and Toronto

Average Home Value in Metro Vancouver

Median Income in Toronto

Visible Minority Population in Metro Vancouver and Toronto

Social Determinants of Health Research for Cowichan Valley

City of Vancouver Integrated Stormwater Management Plan Analysis

Skate Park Planning Community Consultation

Assessment of Building Permits in Toronto

Assessment of Park Accessibility in Vancouver

Analysis of Dog Licences in Toronto and Most Popular Dog Names

Community Gardening in Vancouver and the Arbutus Corridor

Street Lamp Density in the City of Vancouver

Neighbourhood Design Evaluation of Cabbagetown

Environmental Assessment for Woodfibre LNG Proposal

Environmental Assessment for BURNCO Mine Proposal

Valentines Map

Walkability Map of Vancouver

Want More? Check out my "Thirteen Best Maps of 2013"

Cycling Networks in Vancouver, Toronto and Chicago

The following three maps show the cycle tracks (protected bike lanes), painted bike lanes, shared lanes (sharrows) and other types of routes for cycling. Each map is shown at the same scale and colours, to provide a direct comparison of the network form and character. I hope this helps inspire toronto to learn from the other two leading cities in North America.

Healthy Built Environment Linkages Toolkit

I am very happy today because a new “evidence-based resource to improve communication between planners, local government, and health [sector professionals]” is now publicly available. This toolkit was produced over the past two years by the Health Build Environment Alliance, a voluntary intersectoral network that provides leadership and action for healthier, more livable communities organized by the Provincial Health Services Authority. I have excitedly witnessed the development process since I have been a member of the Alliance for the past three-years (first as a health sector representative of the Human Early Learning Partnership and now as a planning representative due to my employment transition to Golder Associates' Sustainable Communities Group). Please click the link below to download the full PDF Toolkit:

Healthy Built Environment Linkages: A Toolkit for Design, Planning and Health

You may also click here download the complete dissemination package, that includes a 2-page research brief, a PowerPoint slideshow template, and a poster for an introductory webinar planned for April 30th, 2014.

According to the webinar poster, this "Toolkit is the first evidence-based and expert-informed resource that links planning principles to health outcomes and identifies the behavioural impacts (e.g., walking and transit use) and environmental impacts (e.g., noise and traffic safety) that contribute to those outcomes." be sure to register today to learn more.

Essentially, the toolkit provides a single, unifying framework focused on five themes of planning principals for creating a healthy built environment. These 21 principals may not be revolutionary to informed urban planners, but the key is this document is designed to build a shared vision and common language that is accessible to both the planning and health sector professionals.

In addition, the really revolutionary content is a comprehensive evidence review that connects each planning principal to specific outcomes and health impacts. Each linkage line is also coded to highlight the strength of the evidence that exists. I see this as a great opportunity for Planners to improve their focus on the health benefits of their work. For example, I cannot wait until someone asks me to highlight the health benefits of a protected bike lane and I can quote the item #2 below:

An single summary page is also included for each theme of planning principals - I hope all planners print these five sheets and keep them close at hand, particularly if they are planning to work in partnership with the health sector:

In closing, I also want to highlight the introductory PowerPoint slides describe the following core objectives:

It’s a “conversation-starter”: Provides an organizing framework for presenting information and facilitating discussions between & within sector;
Helps users apply health evidence: Provides consistent & clear messages to inform the development of other documents & support decision-making around health & the built environment; and
Can identify where more research needed: Provides a roadmap for emerging and innovative evidence.

Please share this resource with your peers and feel free to post comments below if you have any questions.

Garden Deserts: Community Garden Plots per Person in Vancouver

Do you want to sign up for a community garden plot in Vancouver? If so, you are not alone - demand for garden space has surged in recent years as the local food movement has become mainstream. According to data published on the City's Open Data Site, there are approximately 3,965 garden plots of various types in the City and there are about 600,000 people in Vancouver. Therefore, there is approximately 1 garden plot per 150 people living in the city today.

After I created an interactive map showing all Community Gardens and Food Trees last year, I was asked by the Evergreen BC 'Seeding Healthy Communities' program coordinator if I could explore the distribution of garden plots within the city, with an eye towards understanding the spatial accessibility of existing gardens to citizens. I volunteered to conduct this analysis because I wanted to know if there were 'garden deserts' within the City where population-based demand for plots was much greater than supply?

I began by visualizing the number of plots per garden location as shown on the map below:

I also mapped the total population per census block based on the Statistics Canada's 2011 Census of Population.

To evaluate the relative supply and demand for garden plots within Vancouver, I transformed the point data from the two maps above into kernel density surfaces, based on the number of garden plots and people within 1 km from every point in the City. This process yeilded two surfaces, the number of plots per square kilometer and the number of people per square kilometer - I then divided these to derive a measure of 'Garden Plots per 1,000 People' as shown in on the map below. The dark green areas are relatively well served while lighter yellow and grey areas have very few or no plots per person:

I am a big fan of the City of Vancouver's Greenest City initiative that among other goals has supported creation of many new community gardens in the past few years, but I believe more gardens are still needed. What is the right number? That I cannot say. But I would suggest this map could be used to help plan where additional gardens may be needed from a spatial equity perspective. Although policy makers and advocates should also weigh other variables such as income level of communities. Additionally, there may be relatively less need for gardens in currently 'underserved' areas of the city where single family homes may have back yard gardens that may seem to negate the demand for community gardens.

That said, as a proud member of the Cypress Community Garden in Kitsilano, community gardens have a much greater impact beyond increasing local food security. In my experience gardens have an important role in increasing community social connectedness, which has in turn been linked in a recent Vancouver Coastal Health survey to improved sense of health and well-being. So with each new garden that is planted, we may in fact be growing a healthier community for generations to come.

CLICK HERE TO SEE MY THE INTERACTIVE MAP OF ALL COMMUNITY GARDENS

I am in the home stretch of creating a new open source walkability dataset I am calling "WalkMap" based on open data obtained from Open Street Map (OSM). The key benefit of using the OSM data is it includes all urban walking paths and trails in addition to main roads. I am currently refining the processing model for the Greater Vancouver area and hope to make this data available for all of Canada in the next few months. Currently Walkscore (TM) provides a great user interface but their data are fairly coarse-grained and very expensive to obtain. Therefore, my work is based on a unique 100m processing grid and I am planning to provide both the methodology and outputs via an open source licence. My goal is to create one primary WalkMap Index, as well as specific measures of the following WalkMap components:

Walkable Area - The total area you can access by walking 800m along a road or trail in every possible direction
Connectivity - The density of street street intersections
Destinations - The number of shops, cafes or other businesses within walking distance.
Infrastructure - The number of crosswalks, benches, water fountains, and other pedestrian infrastructure.
Nature - Proportion of the walkable area that is natural vegetation, recreation or park space.

I will also visualize my results on a simple mapping portal with cartography handled by MapBox, another exciting tool I am learning to use:

I have not designed a legend yet, but here is the basic story:

Green = More Walkable, Red =Less Walkable, No colour = Not Walkable

Please subscribe to this blog for future project updates or post a comment below.

Pecha Kucha Presentation: Mapping Healthy Built Environments

I am very grateful for having had the opportunity deliver a Pecha Kucha presentation at the British Columbia Society of Landscape Architects Annual Conference called 'Depth of Field’. My goal for this presentation was to convey my love for maps and my belief that GIS should be utilized more widely in the practice of landscape architecture to analyze multiple scales and layers of context surrounding site-specific work. I illustrated my talk with many maps I created at the Human Early Learning Partnership and other exploratory projects I created out of personal interest. Please post below the video if you have any questions or comments!

Sexual Health Maps, Analysis and Poster Design

This is a project I worked on at HELP over the past year. I personally created each of these maps (and many more!), conducted this simple correlation analysis and then designed this poster that was presented at an international sexual health conference in Washington DC.

Healthy City Maps

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