tailieunhanh - Urban Health and Society: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Research and Practice - Part 5

Urban Health and Society: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Research and Practice - Part 5. This book provides the most current frameworks, research, and approaches for understanding how unique features of the urban physical and social environments that shape the health of over half of the world's population that is already residing in large cities. Its interdisciplinary research and practice focus is a welcome innovation. | Environmental Justice Praxis 21 to forestall displacement and develop strategies for community development and preservation as we discuss later. Although neither author was trained as a public health professional we have learned to appreciate the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge and practice to solve the pressing urban public health problems in ways that go beyond traditional epidemiology and traditional urban planning. We attempt to use with flexibility the tools of applied social science research and exchange knowledge with community activists in a way that can lead to concrete solutions and policy changes. Our own experiences and engagement with other practitioners confirm that environmental justice can play a central role in the development of new approaches that combine an understanding of holistic and multilevel causation with complex multifaceted proposals for intervention. In our own research and advocacy experience we have identified what we call environmental justice praxis a practice based on a holistic worldview that integrates environmental justice organizing policy analysis and research. Environmental justice praxis also opens up new roads to interdisciplinary practice. Our contention is that the environmental justice movement has been a major catalyst for holistic activism research and policy and it has drawn on knowledge from a variety of fields. In this essay we focus on the integration of urban planning and public health but we do not doubt that important lessons can be learned from the relationships with other professional disciplines. We believe therefore that contemporary environmental justice praxis can help to reintegrate and reimagine the fields of public health and urban planning in bold and innovative ways. These two disciplines were founded over a century ago in response to urban epidemics but over the years they have divided for a variety of 5 6 We draw on two case studies to illustrate what we mean by environmental .