Two years ago, several community organizations hosted listening sessions with residents to identify the top priorities in the northeast area of Kansas City, KS. During these sessions, we learned that our residents were grappling with issues centered in the built environment.

The conditions of streets, sidewalks, curbs and lighting were inhibiting our community’s ability to access and enjoy recreational spaces, safe routes to schools and parks, and limiting social interactions between neighbors. These conditions were reducing our residents’ abilities to fully engage in the community and contributing to poor health outcomes.

Following these listening sessions, we invited the residents to participate in a community walk audit and prioritization process. These community-based organizations, have leveraged community feedback, a variety of resources, and technical assistance to create a solution that would mitigate the challenge of unsafe streets and sidewalks.

A “neighborhood walk audit” process was designed by Dotte Agency, a community design extension from the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Design, to allow residents and students to participate in the data collection and prioritization process. As of today, 5 neighborhood audits have been successfully completed. Priority infrastructure improvement recommendations have already helped to inform new sidewalk installation routes where students actually walk to school!

This video represents a health-centered, community-building collaboration between architects and the community's they serve. Increasing walking within our communities can be a strategy for achieving health equity by reducing unequal burdens of disease (low-income communities tend to have higher rates of chronic disease) and reducing transportation costs. It is also an opportunity to increase the diversity of the architecture profession by exposing youth to ways that they can engage in their built environment locally.