Access to Healthy Food and Neighborhood Walkability: Insights through Inter-Professional Curricula

Through the planning of a cross-disciplinary, collaborative course between two University of Kansas departments – public health and architecture – we have developed tools that bring together a shared understanding of how design and health impact one another in two neighborhood communities —one resource rich, the other resource poor.  

We have adapted and hybridized national protocols that assess food access and physical activity, as well as community based participatory research exercises through PhotoVoice, to investigate the relationship between urban design and health disparities. Through lessons learned, this adaptive process has generated unique, integrated disciplinary perspectives and innovative forms of collaboration through technology and boots-on-the-ground engagement.  New cross-disciplinary, analytical communication tools will be applied this semester in real-world neighborhood spaces with participating community residents.  This approach has great potential as both a resource to communities as well framing future perspectives amongst the students.

This complex, interwoven set of tools that we have created between our disciplines and our community partners is an approach that we believe will produce a more well-rounded and community-engaged student, or a future practitioner who is ready to engage in real world adaptive, innovative and integrated approaches for understanding how the built environment impacts public health.