Impact of Built Environment on Respiratory Health: An Empirical Study

In many heavy industrialized countries such as China and India, the impact of air pollution on respiratory health has been headline news in recent years. Among the risk issues examined, exposure to particulate matter (PM) is cited as the prime contributing factor that causes respiratory diseases, yet it is traceable and controllable. In this paper, we report on an empirical study conducted in Shanghai, based on urban spatial determinants as independent variables to investigate its link to occurrence of lung cancer in their neighborhoods. A survey was conducted on a population of 472 lung cancer patients. After reliability and validity tests, only 156 pairs were included in this report. The questionnaire designed for this survey covers 11 outdoor and 6 indoor factors; these include the building density where they live, proximity to pollution sources, volume of traffic nearby, degree of enclosure by surrounding tall buildings, being residential or commercial with reference to their homes, proximity to parks, measured in terms of the plant type, green space per capita, accessibility to public open spaces for outdoor activities and water body; while parameters inside the house cover the age of the house, bedroom sizes, space per occupant, cooling-off time of taking up residency after renovation, humidity and dust inside the houses. Data collected were classified using random forest classification and further refined with Boruta algorithm for feature selection to identify possible correlation between risk of lung cancer to both outdoor and indoor factors of built environment. The results reveal a strong correlation between lung cancer and the environment where they live, so much so that the finding confirms our long-held belief that urban redevelopment could play an important role in reducing the risk of respiratory disease. Since prevention is better than cure, if by design to relocate pollution sources away from residential areas, provision of good public transportation to cut down vehicles on our streets, creation of green spaces to improve airflow pathway to deduce the concentration of PM in the atmosphere in our neighborhoods, we could perhaps reduce or even prevent lung cancer and a range of other respiratory diseases for the residents we served.