Jason Corburn and Street Science: Planning with the Neighbourhood

Street science is the name the planner Jason Corburn, a professor of planning and public health at the University of California, Berkeley, gave in Street Science (2005) to the combination of experts' technical knowledge with communities' local knowledge to decide what makes a city healthy. A technical map says a neighbourhood has a certain environmental problem; its residents look at the same territory and point to what the map does not record, because they know schedules, routes, homes and exposures. Corburn's question is who should produce the knowledge that guides planning, and his answer does not replace experts with neighbours but puts them to work together so that health equity enters the process from the start.

Greenpoint and Williamsburg: when local knowledge corrected the models

The book was born in Brooklyn. Corburn studied in the 1990s Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Latino, Polish and Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods with incinerators, waste plants and a sewage treatment works, where environmental agencies calculated risks with standard models while residents documented asthma, subsistence fishing in the polluted East River and lead exposure. Four cases, risk assessment for fish diets, childhood asthma, lead contamination and air quality, showed that local knowledge corrected technical assumptions: the models assumed nobody ate fish from the river and families did so daily. Street science was not less rigorous but more complete.

Three steps of street science: recognise, incorporate, evaluate

The mechanism has three steps. First, recognising that different forms of knowledge observe different parts of the problem: technical measurement compares and organises, residents' experience captures everyday uses and conditions. Then incorporating community knowledge into the production of evidence itself, through participatory research, collaborative maps, neighbourhood counts and joint diagnoses, rather than as a consultation after a solution has been decided. Finally, evaluating options by asking who receives the benefits and who bears the risks. Corburn calls that process environmental justice in practice, because participation changes what is measured and for what.

Toward the Healthy City: San Francisco and Richmond

In Toward the Healthy City (2009) he extended the approach to urban planning. His thesis is that planning and public health were born together in the nineteenth century, separated during the twentieth and must reunite to address health inequality, which is decided by housing, transport, food, green space and pollution more than by hospitals. He studied San Francisco, where the public health department developed health impact assessments of planning proposals with neighbourhoods, and Richmond, California, an industrial city beside a refinery whose 2012 general plan included for the first time a community health element drafted with residents.

Influence: health impact assessments and community mapping

His work converses with Robert Bullard's environmental justice, with community-based participatory research and with Sheila Jasanoff's critique of expert knowledge. It has influenced the health impact assessments many cities now require of their plans, neighbourhood health equity observatories and the informal settlement upgrading programmes Corburn advises in Nairobi, Medellín or Rio de Janeiro, where community mapping of services and risks has become the basis of planning. The objection that badly designed participation does not improve decisions he accepts: street science demands method, not just assemblies.

Corburn's lesson is that the neighbourhood's wisdom is not a complement to planning but a source of evidence without which technical decisions fail, because they measure what does not matter and omit what harms. A healthy and just city is planned by first asking those who live its consequences what should be observed, and by combining their knowledge with technical knowledge to decide where to invest, what to ban and whom to protect. Turning that combination into method is what transforms urban planning into social justice.