The University of Wisconsin Office of Sustainability hosted their fourth annual Sustainability Symposium Oct. 29. The afternoon consisted of remarks on the state of campus sustainability, quick flash talks around health and sustainability and poster presentations from current researchers at UW.
The feature part of the symposium was a keynote address presented by an instructor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and founder of Architectural Epidemiology — an organization evaluating building design and public health — Dr. Adele Houghton.
Architectural Epidemiology is a new sub category of epidemiology, that focuses on how buildings and public health intersect with each other along with integrating how climate change alters building design and public health, Houghton said.
The keynote address began by discussing the current state of climate change and the impact on health in the U.S. With the nation dropping out of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2020, many cities signed the We Are Still In Pledge to take measures against climate change running parallel to the Paris Climate Agreement, Houghton said.
Actions of the pledge include trying to change climate at a community level, rather than an individual level. Studies have shown that community level climate change provides benefits to human health in an economically efficient way, Houghton said.
“Small change to the environment is the most economically effective way to produce health benefits,” Houghton said.
Solving problems in Architectural Epidemiology is done through a multi step process that utilizes transdisciplinary resources to create positive health outcomes. Houghton said these problems include projects such as road design to improve asthma or building new playgrounds in dense, urban neighborhoods to improve access for children to get physical activity.
The process begins by looking at analyzing the existing building infrastructure as a baseline. Also, it checks that mediating factors — which is a third variable — is not the reason for the relationship between the two original variables, Houghton said.
“We can start modeling what the population health outcomes might be,” Houghton said.
Houghton said partnering with different disciplines, which contribute to architectural epidemiology, is important. She said transdisciplinary research should be built out, which matches UW’s RISE initiative that aims to tackle complex challenges important to Wisconsin and the world.
Collaboration is necessary as there are key differences in the purposes of architectural and epidemiological research. Architecture focuses on action to build the environment while epidemiology focuses on explaining health trends, Houghton said.
Working together allows factors such as health disparities from buildings and the designs of new sustainable technologies to be accounted for, producing more all-encompassing solutions, she said.
“One example of collaboration would be to track disparities to help inform the design process and then measure what the change is,” Houghton said.
Students can find out more about architectural epidemiology and how the field is able to implement projects following the architectural epidemiology framework by reading Houghton’s book, Architectural Epidemiology.
