Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #113679

Jason Corburn, PhD¹, Jeff Osleeb, PhD², and Michael Porter². (1) Urban Planning Program, Columbia University, 415 Avery Hall, 1172 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027, 212-481-5262, jtc2105@columbia.edu, (2) Earth & Environmental Sciences, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10016

Land use policies and practices in urban areas, including zoning, facility siting and built environment features more generally, play a role in neighborhood-level exposures to hazardous air pollutants or air toxics. Urban air toxics are suspected of contributing to adverse health outcomes including asthma, low birth weight, and cancer. However, few cities have networks of street-level hazardous air pollutant monitoring, limiting the ability of community members and environmental health professionals from making informed intervention decisions. This paper suggests that land use information can act as a proxy for air toxics monitoring data. Using a set of publicly available data that provide detailed information on point sources from facility location, size, and chemical use, mobile source contributions from truck routes and intersection traffic counts, and area sources from manufacturing land use data, we develop a dispersion model of air toxics using GIS spatial analytic tools across New York City neighborhoods. Our land use-air toxics model builds on the National Air Toxics Assessment, but improves these modeled data by including neighborhood specific inputs that allow for census-tract level analyses - - a key limitation of the NATA data for most urban areas. The paper describes the importance of land use data for understanding air toxic exposures, especially in the absence of monitoring data, how urban planners and public health professionals can use readily available land use data to estimate air toxic hazards at the census-tract level, and offers policy recommendations for analyzing the built environment and air toxics in urban neighborhoods.

Learning Objectives:

• Participants will learn how specific land uses contribute to air toxic pollution in urban areas
• Participants will learn how to develop an air dispersion model for air toxics that are known respiratory irritants using Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
• Participants will be able to identify publicly available land use data and input these data into an air dispersion model.
• Participants will be able to qualitatively analyze modeled air toxics exposure data from the National Air Toxics Assessment with our alternative land use model for neighborhoods in New York City.

Keywords: Environmental Exposures, Urban Health

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Recorded presentation