Monitoring urban neighborhoods to reduce spatial inequities in wellbeing

Neighborhood environments play a significant role in shaping the wellbeing of individuals and communities, but empirical evidence is limited by a lack of data collecting across neighborhoods, cities, and time. Drawing on innovations for monitoring urban environments, applying computer vision to identifying visible neighborhood conditions in imagery, and survey methods to assess wellbeing, the researchers will pilot a data infrastructure to monitor multiple features of urban environments. If successful, it will collect real-time data in a major city, and examine connections between the natural and visible attributes of urban environments and wellbeing. Based on these analyses, the researchers hope to work with local stakeholders to develop and test interventions that alter different features of the environment aimed at reducing spatial inequality in wellbeing within cities. Interventions that stem from this research can inform solutions to reduce environmental inequities locally and in other cities.