Health Promotion Through Environmental Design (HPTED)

Project Status: Current
Project Tags: Core Project, Flint and Genesee County

Project Details

Director: Marc Zimmerman, PhD
Community Director: E. Yvonne Lewis, BBA, BS, HFRCC Executive Director
Managing Director: Alison Grodzinski, MLIS
Project Manager: Susan Franzen, MS
Partner Organizations: Michigan State University Division of Public Health – Flint, Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center, Kettering University
Community Advisory Board: HPTED Partners (details below)
Project Dates: 2019-2024
Funding Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Project Fact Sheet: Health Promotion Through Environmental Design (HPTED): PRC-MI (2019-2024) [PDF]

Health Promotion Through Environmental Design (HPTED) is the core project of the Prevention Research Center of Michigan (PRC-MI). HTPED was awarded CDC funding from 2019-2024. The project takes place in Flint, MI, a community we have worked with for over 20 years. Our community partnerships, work with multiple universities, as well as our previous studies and research experience help create an approach to healthy and inclusive change.

Health Promotion Through Environmental Design (HPTED) is an approach that creates safe and healthy built environments using a health promotion and health equity lens. HPTED adapts Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) principles that focus on reducing crime and violence as a way to enhance the potential for health promotion activities such as physical activity and healthy eating, and improving mental health by building community relationships and neighborhood safety.

HPTED widens the focus of CPTED to promote positive health outcomes, improve psychological and behavioral health, and empower neighborhoods. HPTED activities modify or activate the built environment through:

improving neighborhood safety,
creating healthy environments for people to live, work, and play and
bringing people together to create more connected communities.

Our goal is to conduct a city-wide evaluation of HPTED strategies. These strategies, which can be large or small scale, temporary (e.g., a pop-up healthy eating event), or permanent (e.g., a demolition).

We are investigating the effects of these strategies on neighborhood health, crime and safety, and community connectedness and establishing an evidence base. This is accomplished by PRC-MI and HPTED partners:

Collecting information about HPTED activities that are occurring in Flint, MI (view our HPTED Implementation Recruitment Flier to learn more and get involved),
Conducting neighborhood surveys to measure resident activities, health behaviors, and perceptions of their neighborhood, and
Using the Neighborhood Inventory for Environmental Typology (NIfETy) to measure features of the built and social environment that may affect health and violence outcomes.