 Hi, I'm Rodrigo Silva and welcome to the first episode of Let's Talk About Urban Planning. We kick off our set of episodes with two guests, Richard Sadler from Michigan State University and Julia Felton from the Henry Ford Health in the United States. Richard and Julia will talk with us today about how disordered urban environments can have negative impacts on the individual's mental health, leading to symptoms such as anxiety or depression. This conversation is based on research that was published in our open access journal, Urban Planning. Richard, Julia, thank you very much for being here today. Thank you for having us. I would perhaps start with you, Richard. Why is this topic so important? Yeah, so I'm a medical geographer. Everything I do is looking at how the built environment might impact health behaviors or health outcomes. I work a lot with psychologists and physicians and other folks who care about health on the biological side and I bring in the environmental side. And there's still a lot about the built environment, of course, that we're still learning. And with respect to discriminatory housing practices and their legacy impacts, I think we've just only touched the iceberg of what the impacts might be. There's been a lot of work on redlining the last five or 10 years, but there's a lot of other practices about how we've upheld segregation and discrimination in our housing environments that's yet to be studied. Julia, anything to add, according to the audience? So as a clinical psychologist and from the field of psychology, there's really sort of an evolving understanding of the impact of the built environment on mental health and specifically like these longer term effects of structural racism and trauma and instability within the environment. And we're kind of finally just now creating the tools and the data sets that we need to start really looking at these impacts, but the field is still really young and growing. And so we hope that studies like these will help to contribute to our emerging understanding of these effects. Very good. And Julia, also for you, so specifically about your research. So what was the research gap that you were hoping to feel? So what are you hoping to find when you launch this research? So we really were just hoping to find some sort of preliminary understanding of how these traditionally discriminatory housing practices impact mental health and youth. There's really not anything out there at this point. So we're just doing a prime preliminary survey of what it is. And then we're really hoping that this research will lead to other studies that can do maybe a deeper dive. Of course, Rick, anything to add about this research gap? Yeah, yeah, we know in especially in the US that kids who grow up in disinvested communities fair or worse in a whole host of ways. But a lot of the time, the way that this disadvantage is measured is by racial segregation or income. But it's these other processes that we also want to understand what is the potential impact of, you know, discrimination in the housing environment over many decades in terms of how that shapes the communities and how it makes communities look. Let's jump into findings after this contextualization. Rick, what are the main findings of your research? Yeah, so we had data on self reported perception of neighborhood conditions as well as internalizing symptoms like anxiety and depression. And then we had a measure of social cohesion, so how well connected the kids felt in their communities. And so most straightforwardly, and Julia can add a bit of context to this in terms of how we built the model. But we found that boys who lived in neighborhoods that had experienced high degrees of white flight, so basically huge amounts of population movement in the 70s and 80s by the white population. And also girls who lived in gentrifying neighborhoods, so neighborhoods that were seeing new investment and displacement who had poor social cohesion metrics were more likely to have poorer outcomes with respect to anxiety and depression. So kids who, boys who lived in neighborhoods that had been kind of declining for many decades and girls that lived in neighborhoods that were rapidly changing in terms of physical improvements, both experienced the same kind of outcome where they were poor, anxiety and depression. Julia, what other research findings are worthy of indicating? Yeah, so I think for me specifically, one of the most interesting things that came out were these gender differences. And again, surprisingly to me, they're not actually unique. So of the sort of limited number of studies that are out there on the impact of housing on child outcomes, several also have found differences in the impacts on boys and girls. And this suggests, I think that there's a need for more nuanced research to understand why that is. We tend to use biological sex as a proxy for a number of experiences and socialization processes that I think in future studies in this field, we need to consider more closely and break down a little bit further. It is very interesting that we can have two perspectives from different academic bank crowds on this. So also, Julia, how can this from your point of view, how can these findings impact somehow in terms of public policies in terms of individual choice? So how do the findings translate into real life situations? Yeah, and I think that's a really wonderful question. I think it's it's helpful to start to think about investing in research that would sort of show us how we translate these accumulating evidence of the impact of historical discriminatory housing practices on to kind of actionable next policy steps. But I think that right now we're just sort of at the tip of the iceberg in time to disentangle and understand better all of these the pathways really from how these housing practices have led to poor outcomes for vulnerable individuals. Absolutely. And from your point of view, Rick, what how can these findings impact public policies, individual choice? How would you say? Yeah, I mean, in the US, we've created really awful urban environments and in particular environments that harbor poor health outcomes for kids. And so to me, I think it's not enough to think of how do we build healthier communities? We have to be looking back at what what all did we do wrong that led us to this point? And so building neighborhoods where resources are more equitably distributed, including a broader mix of housing types, for example, could alleviate some of these issues. So in the US, a lot of our catastrophic urban planning decisions had to do with ultra concentrating our poor populations and not creating a social or economic environment where it's easier to move through the system. So for example, like in California, there's policy, a new policy that single family zoning is outlawed. Any neighborhood technically can engender multi family housing. And perhaps in other countries, the fact that we even need to legislate this might sound silly because building cities has never been about. Well, it's always been about social exclusion. But in the era of the automobile and certainly in the US case, the pattern has been to build single family homes on these cookie cutter lots and and separate people by income, but reintegrating communities by by race and socioeconomic status and doing that from the ground up. I think has big opportunities for resolving some of these. And so like Julia said, building this research base and making it getting findings that are incontrovertible incontrovertible that show this is the impact of these awful urban planning practices can possibly help start moving the needle over time. Of course, Julia, you mentioned and very well that we are still seeing tip of the iceberg when it comes to research about this topic. Can you explore a little bit more about that? So what's now left to find? What should we explore now? So what doors does your research open? Yeah, yeah. So I think one of the things that we need to do is look more longitudinally. So we, you know, we took kind of a cross section in time and we looked at these, you know, historical practices and how they impact now. I think now the next step is to really look kind of broader and even further in the future. We, you know, we're just sort of starting to understand like these intergenerational effects of of things. And we're really starting as a field to look at how early experiences, even like prior to when we were born, can impact our our health. So we need those. I think the one place for future research is to think more about or develop the data sets and the tools that we need to look more long term over time and then also, you know, we rely so much on self report measures and things like that, which, you know, have absolutely have their place in our field. But more data, better data is always really helpful to be able to, as Rick said, kind of find this incontrovertible proof that we can then really leverage to make policy change. Absolutely. Rick, what about from your point of view? What's next? Yeah, so two things in particular come to mind. So on the one hand, Julia and I work a lot on pediatric populations. And I also have a project that is the population of interest is an aging population. So when we study these impacts, we might be looking at the developmental impacts, but we can also see how do these kinds of neighborhoods impact the aging process? So how does living in this kind of place for 20 or 30 years predict poor aging outcomes in terms of frailty or cognitive decline? So the expanding to different populations in different places. And so as a part of that, one thing that I'm also doing is digging into how can we replicate these measures in multiple cities? So this study was in Baltimore in Maryland. I'm located in Flint, Michigan. Julia is in Detroit, Michigan, and we have colleagues all across the country. And some of these measures, I think, are easily replicable either by using census data or archival data. There's other processes in the historical built environment that we want to look at, like where were freeways built, where were urban renewal projects perpetrated, where were there restrictive covenants where people couldn't buy homes based on their race? So we want to start layering in more of these and in more cities. And then with that data, hopefully we could look at a more national level study of these impacts. Still a lot to explore then in the future about to be explored yet. Thank you. I would conclude this conversation by asking you, Rick, if there is any other materials that you can offer to our listeners, podcasts or articles, books. And of course, self-promotion is is available if you want to. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I've been working in this space for about the last, I guess, almost 10 years now since about the end of my PhD. My colleague, Don Ruffinier at Michigan Tech, works a lot in the historical space and has a project called the Keyway Not Time Traveler. That's a web platform for exploring historical data. And it's that kind of platform that we hope to create for these structural racism and housing metrics. But there are also other projects out there. So the Mapping Inequality Project at the University of Richmond, the Mapping Prejudice Project at the University of Minnesota. And then also archival data from HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development that has a listing of urban renewal projects. So that's where we're going to be getting a lot of our data from is these three, these three things. One of the books in particular that inspired this work or kind of kept prodding the work along was The Color of Law, which is also a Baltimore focused book, although it certainly has implications nationwide. There's a ton of books on the on the topic. The Thomas Sigru wrote a book. It's too early in the morning. But yeah, Thomas Sigru's book on the origins of the urban crisis was found foundational to the work that I'm doing here. So those are just a couple. But I'm sure with a little bit of digging, all of the rest of those books would start kind of percolating to the top. Of course, thank you, Rick, for sharing these additional materials with us. This episode that you just listened is available on Let's Talk About Urban Planning website on Koji Tati's YouTube channel, as well as in podcast directories. Richard, Julia, it was a pleasure having you here. Thank you for having us.