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A Local View of Informal Urban Environments: a Mobile Phone-Based Neighborhood Audit of Street-Level Factors in a Brazilian Informal Community

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Abstract

Street-level environment characteristics influence the health behaviors and safety of urban residents, and may particularly threaten health within informal communities. However, available data on how such characteristics vary within and among informal communities is limited. We sought to adapt street audit strategies designed to characterize the physical environment for use in a large informal community, Rio das Pedras (RdP) located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A smartphone-based systematic observation protocol was used to gather street-level information for a high-density convenience sample of street segments (N = 630, estimated as 86% of all street segments in the community). We adapted items related to physical disorder and physical deterioration. Measures selected to illustrate the approach include the presence of the following: (1) low-hanging or tangled wires, (2) litter, (3) structural evidence of sinking, and (4) an unpleasant odor. Intercept-only spatial generalized additive models (GAM) were used to evaluate and visualize spatial variation within the RdP community. We also examined how our estimates and conclusions about spatial variation might have been affected by lower-density sampling from random subsets street observations. Random subsets were selected to determine the robustness of study results in scenarios with sparser street sampling. Selected characteristics were estimated to be present for between 18% (unpleasant odor) to 59% (low-hanging or tangled wires) of the street segments in RdP; estimates remain similar (± 6%) when relying on a random subset created to simulate lower-density spatial sampling. Spatial patterns of variation based on predicted probabilities across RdP differed by indicator. Structural sinking and low-hanging or tangled wires demonstrated relatively consistent spatial distribution patterns across full and random subset sample sizes. Smartphone-based systematic observations represent an efficient and potentially feasible approach to systematically studying neighborhood environments within informal communities. Future deployment of such tools will benefit from incorporating data collection across multiple time points to explore reliability and quantify neighborhood change. These tools can prove useful means to assess street-level exposures that can be modifiable health determinants across a wide range of informal urban settings. Findings can contribute to improved urban planning and provide useful information for identifying potential locations for neighborhood-scaled interventions that can improve living conditions for residents in Rio das Pedras.

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to the team in Rio de Janeiro who were crucial to making the larger project successful, particularly Debora de Pina Castiglione, Paulo Barroca, and other colleagues at Fundação Oswaldo Cruz; Claudia Franco Correa and her team at the Center for Citizenship and Investigation in Rio das Pedras; and the six trained resident data collectors. Thank you to the Built Environment and Health Research Group at Columbia University for partnership and technical input on state of the art urban health mapping. We would like to thank the Columbia Global Center in Rio de Janeiro and Columbia University’s Studio-X in Rio for their help in making the connections necessary to complete this work. Thank you to all project investigators whose expertise made this project stronger and more rewarding: Drs. Kartik Chandran, Ryan Demmer, Gustavo Azenha, and Barun Mathema. Moreover, thank you to our wonderful research team of students: Melika Behrooz, Richa Gupta, Matheus Braz, Eva Siegel, Melanie Askari, and Charlene Goh whose efforts sustained this project through its completion. Special thanks also to Fulcrum and Spatial Networks, Inc., for providing free academic licenses and specifically Bryan McBride, Integrations Manager at Fulcrum. Special thanks go to Medtronic Philanthropy (FY14–000483), the Columbia University Urban+Health Initiative at the Mailman School of Public Health, and a generous pledge and gift from Dana and David Dornsife to the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health, whose generous funding support made this study possible.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Urban Health Collaborative, Dornsife School of Public Health, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Richard V. Remigio & Gina S. Lovasi

  2. Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health, School of Public Health, University of Maryland-College Park, College Park, MD, USA

    Richard V. Remigio

  3. Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York City, NY, USA

    Garazi Zulaika, John Bryan, Daniel M. Sheehan & Andrew Rundle

  4. Escola Nacional de Saúde Publica (ENSP)/Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (FIOCRUZ), Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Renata S. Rabello

  5. Department of Epidemiology, Boston University School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

    Sandro Galea

  6. Programa de Computação Científica (PROCC), Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Marilia S. Carvalho

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  1. Richard V. Remigio
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Correspondence to Richard V. Remigio.

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Remigio, R.V., Zulaika, G., Rabello, R.S. et al. A Local View of Informal Urban Environments: a Mobile Phone-Based Neighborhood Audit of Street-Level Factors in a Brazilian Informal Community. J Urban Health 96, 537–548 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-019-00351-7

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