Engaging Citizens Via Journey Maps to Address Urban Health Issues.

Engaging Citizens Via Journey Maps to Address Urban Health Issues. Environ Health Insights. 2020;14:1178630220963126 Authors: Pomeroy-Stevens A, Afdhal M, Mishra N, Farnham Egan K, Christianson K, Bachani D Abstract Effectively addressing urban health challenges requires engagement of citizens. However, citizens often face barriers providing feedback, and city officials likewise face difficulties incorporating feedback in a meaningful and systematic way. This paper shares one innovative approach to capturing citizens' stories about urban health concerns, developed by the Building Healthy Cities (BHC) project in 2 Asian cities (Indore, India, and Makassar, Indonesia). Using ethnographic methods, BHC developed "journey maps" as a monitoring tool to follow key service issues over time. Several urban health-related issues were identified in each city. For this paper, we focus on wastewater management, which was a serious health issue in both cities. Qualitative data were collected from citizens in one neighborhood and city officials quarterly starting in early 2018; these data were supplemented by city spending data, usage statistics, photos and news articles. In both cities, the journey maps captured notable changes during the first 2 years of the project. At the start of the journeys (2018), informal settlement citizens in Indore reported poor drainage which was compounded by trash, narrow roads blocking vehicular removal of waste, a...
Source: Environmental Health Insights - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Environ Health Insights Source Type: research