Collaborative research & practice for healthy & equitable urban development

City planning practices shape the physical and social qualities in places that often drive environmental health inequities. However, very few city planners understand the social determinants of health inequities, how environmental injustices in places might ‘get under our skin' to influence well being and new models for healthy and just urban development. This session will describe a teaching, research and action collaborative between urban planning students and an environmental and food justice organization in West Oakland, California, called People's Grocery. We will highlight how the collaborative used insights from participatory science and environmental health policy making to inform the design and programming for a new, community-owned retail grocery store. During the project, the team sought to merge issues of land use development, job creation, pollution exposures, transit access, violence and clinical/social services with food access and affordability. The collaboration also fed-back into the classroom to shape a new course focusing on how city planning and public health can explore and act on address place-based health inequities. We explore how collaboration among researchers, students and community members can merge city planning, environmental justice and health inequities/social determinants of health work and move these fields from an orientation of largely describing and analyzing problems to generating new, urban development solutions that promote environmental health justice.