Built environments are human-designed places where you live, work, and play
Topics include:
The Washington State Department of Health's Built Environment Team works to support healthy communities across the state. Built environments are human-designed places where you live, work, and play. Our team fosters relationships with governments and organizations to communicate connections to public health and transportation, land use, and community planning. Our team presents information to government decision makers so that they understand and consider health impacts for built environments. We do this using scientific literature, data, and voices of communities. When in partnership with Tribes, we uphold Tribal data sovereignty, while also centering Indigenous knowledge and lived experience.
The goals of the Built Environment Team include:
- Providing information about why and how the built environment affects health – particularly cardiovascular disease, asthma, diabetes, cancer, and mental health.
- Informing Washingtonians about how they can learn more and get involved in healthy community planning at a local level.
- Providing resources to support public health through built environment interventions to local health jurisdictions, planners, and local leaders. This includes consulting with Tribes in government-to-government partnerships to engage in built environment work through their own systems, priorities, and decision-making structures.
What are Built Environments?
Built environments are human-designed places where you live, work, and play. These places and spaces – including neighborhoods, transportation systems, food systems, parks, schools, and communal spaces – influence our daily lives and can affect our physical health, mental health, and social wellbeing.
Built environments shape our exposure and access to things that can benefit or harm our health. Good air quality, physical activity, and healthy eating are linked to preventing or managing chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and asthma.
Neighborhood Conditions
- Homes & streets - Housing, sidewalks, crosswalks, outdoor play spaces
- Community services - Libraries, restaurants, childcare, social spaces, schools, indoor recreation, workplaces
- Learn more about neighborhood conditions.
Transportation
- Reliable, accessible, multiple options
- Bus, light rail, bike lanes, shared-use paths, safe and well-maintained roadways
- Learn more about transportation.
Food Access
- Accessible, affordable, and culturally appropriate
- Variety of nutritious foods and sources - Grocery stores, corner stores, farmers markets and community/home gardens
- Learn more about food access.
Parks and Green Space
- Trees, shade, and vegetation
- Recreational trails, fields, courts, and playgrounds
- Outdoor public spaces - plazas, squares, parks
- Learn more about parks and green space.
Healthy Community Planning
- Local land use planning and zoning decisions
- Housing, development, and transportation policies
- Environmental review policies
- Learn more about healthy community planning.
Built Environment and Health
Social and structural determinants of health are factors like income, policies, and history of community disinvestment that shape our built environments and related health outcomes.
The built environment is one of several social and structural elements that affect our health. Evidence shows that your built environment can influence your risk of health outcomes like asthma, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and mental health conditions.
Health outcomes like life expectancy, premature death, and chronic disease can vary widely between counties, cities, and neighborhoods, as well as income level and racial and ethnic identity. In Washington state, your life expectancy can be up to 11 years shorter due to where you live, with an average life expectancy ranging from 86 years in one county to only 74 years in some counties, according to County Health Rankings & Roadmaps 2024 data.
Other factors that impact your built environment are geography (urban, rural, Tribal lands), history of investment or disinvestment, and local laws.
Changing our built environment has the power to improve or worsen our health, which is why it’s important to encourage local leaders to prioritize public health when making decisions about places that affect us.
Improving built environments also requires meaningful Tribal engagement, respect for Tribal authority, and recognition of Tribal jurisdiction and treaty rights, particularly when decisions affect Tribal lands, citizens, or ancestral territories.
DOH's built environment framework has five interconnected topics: neighborhood conditions, food access, transportation, parks and green space and healthy community planning. These topics affect health outcomes and are interrelated with social and structural factors that shape health.
Our Work
The Built Environment Team is funded by Foundational Public Health Services (FPHS). FPHS are core services which the governmental public health system is responsible for providing in a consistent and uniform way in every community in Washington (RCW 43.70.512).
Our team is currently available to support local health jurisdictions across the state through resources, capacity, and technical assistance on health and the built environment. Two tools we use to assess how the built environment affects health and inform decision-makers are Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) and State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) comment letters.
The Washington State Department of Health and partners completed a modified HIA, called a Health Analysis, on the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Program. This independent analysis was submitted to the IBR Program as a public comment on the Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement.
- Full Report - Interstate Bridge Replacement Program Health Analysis (PDF)
- Executive Summary (PDF)
- Recommendations (PDF)
Bias in the Built Environment
All built environments are planned and developed by humans, so there has been bias, discrimination, and racism built into our communities which affects people differently. Unequal environments have contributed to unequal health outcomes throughout history and continue to this day.
Today, Tribes steward and live in relationship with the lands and waters of what we now call Washington and have since time immemorial. Tribes have unique and sacred relationships and understandings of the natural environment. These Tribal frameworks are sovereign, place-based systems of knowledge that may differ from DOH’s framework of health and the built environment. Present-day harms to the built environment, and the health inequities that causes, are the legacy of settler colonization of Indigenous ancestral lands.
We are continually expanding our understanding and content about the relationship between health and the built environment, environmental justice, and racial justice. The Built Environment Team will update this webpage to provide information and resources. Future updates will be informed through collaboration with LHJs, planners, Tribes, and other partners.
For questions, comments, and inquiries, please contact us at BuiltEnvironment@doh.wa.gov.