Assessment of Doubly Disadvantaged Neighborhoods by Healthy Living Environment Exposure

Dong Liu; Mei-Po Kwan; Zihan Kan

doi:10.1007/s12061-022-09495-7

Assessment of Doubly Disadvantaged Neighborhoods by Healthy Living Environment Exposure

Appl Spat Anal Policy. 2023;16(2):689-702. doi: 10.1007/s12061-022-09495-7. Epub 2022 Dec 17.

Authors

Dong Liu^{1

2}, Mei-Po Kwan^{1

3}, Zihan Kan^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, New Territories Hong Kong.
² Institute of Future Cities, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, New Territories Hong Kong.
³ Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, New Territories Hong Kong.

Abstract

Good access to greenspace and healthy food has commonly been found to be positively associated with health outcomes, despite some studies finding no significant relationship between them. Examining inequalities in accessing greenspace and healthy food among different disadvantaged neighborhoods can help reveal the disadvantaged races/ethnicities in cities with a high level of residential segregation (i.e., population of the same race/ethnicity concentrated in the same neighborhoods). However, existing studies have mostly focused on measuring the inequalities in accessing either greenspace or healthy food alone, which can lead to the inaccurate depiction of disadvantaged neighborhoods in healthy living environments. Therefore, this paper aims at improving the assessment of doubly disadvantaged neighborhoods by considering accessibility to both greenspace and healthy food in the City of Chicago. Our results show that black-majority neighborhoods are the most doubly disadvantaged in terms of exposure to healthy living environments. This study can help guide policymakers to divert more resources towards the improvement of the urban environment for the most doubly disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Keywords: Chicago; doubly disadvantaged neighborhoods; greenspace; healthy food.

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