Co-Creating Neighbourhoods for Health: An Inverted Socio-Ecological Approach

Abstract

The Active Neighbourhoods Canada (ANC) project employs a participatory urban planning process to aid communities in articulating local strengths, weaknesses and future desires for streets and public spaces. Each project results in a community-driven plan for increasing active transportation and community vibrancy by intervening in the public realm. Funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Innovation Strategy, ANC recognizes the unequal distribution of both power and public realm investment between communities with high or medium incomes, compared to those experiencing poverty and a higher burden of chronic illness. ANC provides a framework for supporting low-income communities by partnering with local organizations and developing resident engagement methods to assess qualitatively how people experience their community and quantitatively how they travel. Throughout, emphasis is placed on providing opportunities for engaged residents to develop their understanding of public participation, active transportation and urban planning and empower them as local advocates through engaged project governance. Much attention has been brought to the issue of implementing public health interventions that successfully engage different levels of the socio-ecological model to facilitate healthy behaviour; particularly the neglected and complex higher levels of this nested hierarchy (the institutional, community and policy/environment levels). Through our three-phased participatory process, ANC intervenes at the individual and interpersonal levels by empowering local residents and engaging marginalized voices to build a consolidated report on local knowledge, community assets, issue areas and future goals; at the community level by supporting a collaborative inter-sector project governance structure that links diverse organizations and people; and finally at the policy or environmental level through professional engagement with municipal staff in planning, engineering and local city councilors to implement elements of community-driven neighbourhood plans. A highlight of the ANC process is how this multi-pronged intervention attends to the interaction that exists between levels of this model. Specifically how our process builds momentum at lower levels of the hierarchy to create capacity in intervening at the more distal levels of local environments and policy. This presentation will link practice with theory by describing our process and outcomes in varied municipal contexts while making overt links to the theoretical knowledge base of an inverted social ecological model. Through these links we will provide real world examples of the role community action research can play when negotiating the challenging goal of attending to individual/interpersonal, community, environment and policy impacts within a single public health intervention to increase active transportation.