In 1854, London England, one of the most populous cities in the world, experienced a terrible outbreak of cholera. The sickness claimed 616 lives, and changed forever how we look at public health. In an attempt to find the cause of the outbreak, acclaimed physician John Snow used mapping and data to track the spread of the disease block by block to locate its source – a water pump in the heart of the capital’s Soho district.
The Faculty of Environment has led Canada for decades in mapping and data techniques, and thanks to a handful of health researchers, following a path established by Snow so many years ago, they’re not only pinpointing health risks in our cities and communities, but also working to design cities that prevent illness.
“Our team recently coined the term, ‘Smart Prevention,’ to describe information and communication technology in cities that can be applied to precision public health goals,” says Leia Minaker, a researcher in Environment’s School of Planning. “Precision public health uses information about mechanisms of disease, vulnerable populations, and key contexts, to match the right intervention with the right population at the right time.”
Minaker and her team are working on a bold seven-year project to show citizens and city governments how municipal policy planning can have a massive impact on the health of citizens, and to make recommendations on how to mitigate negative health impacts.
The plan is to start small – literally. With the help of an app that can be easily loaded on anyone’s phone, they’ll collect real-time behavioural data from participants and combine it with local environmental data to ‘push’ tailored health-behaviour intervention messaging. With that data, Minaker can establish what empirical link there is between micro-environmental exposures like air quality, traffic, density, noise and food access and their health.
“Our health and our communities are very personal to us,” says Minaker. “We’re all different and so is every city. We want this to be a project that people feel comfortable participating in, and we want cities to embrace it in a way that encourages them to develop their own reaction to it. We won’t be prescribing sweeping changes for anyone.”
Part of helping cities help themselves is to create web-based community dashboards that provide data on health and other indicators to both the public and municipal decision makers. A dashboard can identify hot-spots for stress in a city, such as indicating where additional traffic lights, trees, or public art could be installed to reduce stress; or using GPS to identify routes and peak use of existing cycling infrastructure.
Going back to London in 1854, several changes emerged from Snow’s pioneering work fighting cholera. It spawned a movement advocating for better sanitation and infrastructure. It added to calls for better building codes and relief for the cities’ urban poor, whose close quarters aided the spread of cholera. And finally, the modern fields of public health and urban planning were born from Snow’s pioneering work.
“This project is more than just using data to help people live healthier; it is about getting people thinking of their city as something that impacts their health,” says Minaker. “This kind of awareness could lead to smart changes in our communities, but also small personal decisions that add up to something big.”
