Urban Health and Society: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Research and Practice - Part 13. 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. | Methods 101 Academic Partners Lehman College City University of New York CUNY became CUNY s only four-year liberal arts college in the Bronx in 1968. Lehman s Department of Environmental Geographic and Geological Sciences sponsors a certificate program in GISc and brings technical expertise in GIS to the partnership. Research based in geographic information science GISc and environmental and health spatial analyses is conducted in the Urban GISc Lab. Partnership Organization The South Bronx Environmental Justice Partnership SBEJP has operated with funding from the NIEHS since 2001 with Montefiore Medical Center MMC serving as the grantee and For a Better Bronx FABB and Lehman College receiving subcontracts. Although this structure represents the organizational and administrative resources of the partners it does not reflect the relative commitment to environmental justice or environmental health expertise of the partners. In fact only FABB has a mission focused on promoting environmental justice whereas AECOM MMC and Lehman have a variety of clinical educational and research goals. SBEJP has operated generally by consensus and has aims that include organizational development. Currently meetings rotate between each partner s offices with a member of the host organization developing the agenda and chairing the meeting. To better understand health disparities in the Bronx we set out to explore whether environmental factors such as poor outdoor air quality could be shown to have a spatial association with the increased rates of asthma hospitalization in the Bronx. To conduct this multifaceted study we needed to develop a team of experts in several fields as well as community-based scientists. For the asthma and air pollution study the academic medical and communitybased organizations have joined together and all three partners have been instrumental in crafting the methods for the analyses. The process of our collaboration and contribution of each partner is summarized
