Landscape Architecture Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Landscape Architecture Theses and Dissertations by Author "Elderbrock, Evan"

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    No Walk in the Park: Urban Green Space Planning for Health Equity and Environmental Justice
    (University of Oregon, 2023-07-06) Elderbrock, Evan; Russel, Kory
    Cities are complex socio-ecological systems where social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental factors influence health outcomes. With the global population growing increasingly urbanized, understanding how urban environmental conditions affect human health has become a topic of interest among researchers across multiple disciplines. Urban green space—which includes all vegetated land cover (e.g., trees, grass, shrubs, and woodlands), as well as any land uses with publicly available recreational amenities (e.g., parks, schoolyards, university campuses, and conservation areas) located within a city’s geographic boundary—provides multiple health and health-promoting benefits. As such, disparities in park access, park quality, and green cover exposure (i.e., tree canopy and all other vegetation) are considered environmental justice and health equity issues. A wealth of recent research has found that, in general, increased access to parks has been associated with greater likelihood that residents will participate in physical activities and meet physical activity guidelines, and increased exposure to vegetated land cover has corresponded with improved psychological well-being and reduced risk of some mental illnesses. Yet, urban green spaces, and the health benefits such spaces afford, are not distributed equitably, and disparities in urban green space access and exposure based on race, ethnicity, or income represent environmental justice and health equity concerns. In this dissertation, I build upon the existing body of knowledge to 1) investigate how issues of health have shaped urban landscapes in the United States and how the policies and decisions that have shaped urban landscapes have exacerbated health inequities, 2) build upon existing research at the nexus of health and urban green space to improve understanding of relationships between urban green space access/exposure, physical activity, and mental well-being, and 3) develop a method for identifying distributional justice concerns related to urban green space access/exposure to inform urban green space planning for health equity.