Place-based effects on health have been well-documented; however, narrow constructions of place, neighborhood and individual- as well as community-level identity hinder our ability to more fully understand the ways in which place affects health outcomes for diverse populations. Informal settlements in Rio de Janeiro (colloquially referred to as favelas) have been demarcated by local and federal government agencies with fixed boundaries for administrative purposes, including identifying areas for infrastructure improvements, renewal or removal. However, local and federal administrative boundaries often do not match each other, and the collective lived experience of residents of these favela communities tend not to be clearly bounded by those official designations.

This dissertation sets out to address the following questions:

1) How do administrative boundaries of informal settlements overlap, or not, with the terms and definitions used to describe these places by the people who live there?

2) How do residents of informal settlements in Rio de Janeiro operate to either reinforce or push back against these officially designated boundaries?

3) Do narrow constructions of place conceal demographic disparities in access to municipal infrastructure?

In my dissertation I first examine how informal settlements in Rio de Janeiro are places constructed by top-down institutional forces, such as administrative processes employed by the State through the national census and local government efforts to push marginalized residents into these areas, as well as removing these parts of the city entirely. Further, I examine how residents contest and reshape the boundaries of their communities, both in pushing back and challenging the official categorizations of the State, as well as embarking on their own boundary-setting practices by mapping and documenting their communities for themselves with the goal of improving community health and well-being. Through these processes of contested place-making, residents help to identify community needs and provide resources for themselves that the State has been unwilling or unable to provide. Running throughout this work is an understanding that place and identity are socially constructed and socially contested, both dynamically responding to pressure exerted by the State from the top-down and community members from the bottom-up

Traffic exposure assessments could misclassify the extent and locations of exposure if traditional recall surveys and self-reported travel diaries do not record all participant activities. The Harbor Communities Time Location Study (HCTLS) examines the nature, extent and implications of underreported locations/trips in a case study which used portable Global Positioning Systems (GPS) devices to track the diurnal patterns and traffic exposure of 47 residents of communities near the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex. Participants were similar to adults nationwide in time spent indoors, in-vehicle, and outdoors, but spent more time indoors at home (78% vs. 66%). Overall, participants did not report nearly half (49%) of the locations and trips identified in GPS-enhanced data on their activity diaries, resulting in about 3 h/day in unreported locations and 0.6 h/day in unreported trips. The probability of a location/trip being under-reported was systematically correlated with participant and location/trip characteristics. Self-reported data missed about 50 min of heightened air pollution exposures during the 5 h/day on average participants spent in high-traffic areas and about 30 min during the 4 h/day near truck routes. GPS-enhanced methods provide opportunities to more precisely characterize exposure periods and tools to identify facility, roadway, and land use types of the greatest concern for mitigation efforts.

Maternal exposures to traffic-related air pollution have been associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes. Exposures to traffic-related air pollutants are strongly influenced by time spent near traffic. However, little is known about women's travel activities during pregnancy and whether questionnaire-based data can provide reliable information on travel patterns during pregnancy.

Examine women's in-vehicle travel behavior during pregnancy and examine the difference in travel data collected by questionnaire and global positioning system (GPS) and their potential for exposure error.

We measured work-related travel patterns in 56 pregnant women using a questionnaire and one-week GPS tracking three times during pregnancy (<20 weeks, 20-30 weeks, and >30 weeks of gestation). We compared self-reported activities with GPS-derived trip distance and duration, and examined potentially influential factors that may contribute to differences. We also described in-vehicle travel behavior by pregnancy periods and influences of demographic and personal factors on daily travel times. Finally, we estimated personal exposure to particle-bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PB-PAH) and examined the magnitude of exposure misclassification using self-reported vs. GPS travel data.

Subjects overestimated both trip duration and trip distance compared to the GPS data. We observed moderately high correlations between self-reported and GPS-recorded travel distance (home to work trips: r = 0.88; work to home trips: r = 0.80). Better agreement was observed between the GPS and the self-reported travel time for home to work trips (r = 0.77) than work to home trips (r = 0.64). The subjects on average spent 69 and 93 minutes traveling in vehicles daily based on the GPS and self-reported data, respectively. Longer daily travel time was observed among participants in early pregnancy, and during certain pregnancy periods in women with higher education attainment, higher income, and no children. When comparing self-reported vs. GPS data, we found that estimated personal exposure to PB-PAH did not differ remarkably at the population level, but the difference was large at an individual level.

Self-reported home-to-work data overestimated both trip duration and trip distance compared to GPS data. Significant differences in PAH exposure estimates were observed at individual level using self-reported vs. GPS data, which has important implications in air pollution epidemiological studies.

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Background

Methods

Results

Conclusions