Introduction:
Physical activity patterns within the U.S. vary greatly across ethnicity, with data generally indicating lower rates among Hispanic/Latino adults. At the same time, Hispanic/Latino pedestrians face higher rates of injury and fatalities. Despite the importance of supportive physical activity environments on both health and safety outcomes, limited attention has been paid to ethnic or cultural differences in perceptions of supportive environments for walking. To fill this gap, we explore differences in physical and social environment contributors to perceived walkability between pedestrians in predominantly (> 70%) Mexican American and predominantly non-Hispanic white areas in Tucson, Arizona.
Methods:
In early 2017 the research team conducted brief on-street intercept interviews with pedestrians (N = 190) to learn about the environmental attributes associated with pedestrian perceptions of walkability. Study locations were matched for similar physical walkability metrics, income, and poverty rates. Consensus-based thematic coding identified 14 attributes of the built and social environment that contributed, positively and negatively, to perceptions of walkability.
Results:
Attributes of the social environment, both positive (i.e., social interaction, social cohesion, and community identity) and negative (i.e., crime/security), were more frequently expressed as components of walkability in Mexican American study areas while physical environment attributes (i.e., infrastructure, street crossings, and aesthetics) were more frequently mentioned in non-Hispanic white areas.
Conclusions:
Contributors to perceived walkability in non-Hispanic white study areas were largely consistent with existing built environment-focused walkability metrics. Differences seen in Mexican American areas suggest a need to better understand differences across populations, expand the construct of walkability to consider social environment attributes, and account for interactions between social and physical environments. Results highlight the need for collaboration between public health and planning professionals, to evaluate walkability using culturally relevant measures that account for the social environment, particularly in Mexican American and other communities of color.
For the unhoused, the criminalization of their existence amplifies their entanglement with the state. Drawing on interviews and over 200 hours of ethnographic observations in Southern California, US, this paper focuses on everyday interactions between street-level bureaucrats and unhoused residents to examine when and how discretion is exercised and how unhoused residents experience these actions. It elucidates the ‘performative productivity’ employed by street-level bureaucrats to perpetuate ‘the myth’ that housing is available and that the central reason we still have homelessness is that unhoused individuals are service resistant. Performative productivity is a set of practices employed by actors including frontline government workers, non-profit workers, and interfaith and other volunteers as the terms of service. They include setting up meetings, filling out countless forms that require invasive sharing of information, signing up for waitlists that go nowhere, and surrendering rights and often accepting an externally imposed moralistic framework. If a person wants any services at all the terms are non-negotiable, thus compelling the unhoused to participate in the performance or risk loss of eligibility for any housing and non-housing services they have been able to attain, as minuscule or limited as these may be. I contend that this is tantamount to state violence. To make salient this point, I include a series of vignettes that present the street-level presence of the state in the lives of unhoused individuals and places it in a global context to highlight the ways in which the system is arbitrary, unhelpful, and potentially fatal.
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