HealthyPlaces.org > Healthy Places Framework > Place-based Planning > Place-based Planning, page 2

Place-based Planning (continued)

Why consider the place and its target audience? (continued)

Both Habitat and Cabrini-Green provide people with housing, but Habitat leads to home ownership. Habitat, which has built homes in 83 countries, builds houses uniquely suitable for the place and the people who live in them. Habitat requires the homeowners to work to help themselves and others. Cabrini-Green, on the other hand, is a high-rise public housing project produced by politicians who did not connect with the people in need of assistance. It is a notorious hotbed of gang activity, drug abuse, and violent crime where residents become mired in generations of poverty and isolation.

The decentralized diffusion system is an important part of the Healthy Places Framework. It assures that people connected to the place where the intervention is delivered are involved in the process. Interventions that involve people who are connected to the place in choosing specific interventions and in designing delivery strategies are more likely to result in improved health behaviors. (Dzewaltowski, Estabrooks, and Johnston, 2002; Dzewaltowski, Estabrooks, Johnston and Gyurscik, 2002; Green, 1999)

Interventions that use the top-down approach may be prone to being short-lived and may be unlikely to have a lasting effect. Even if the intervention is theoretically well-suited to improving health behaviors of the target audience, not allowing the people connected to the place of delivery — may reduce the likelihood that the intervention will be successful. (Green, 1999)

The context of the place itself can also have a profound effect upon an intervention's effectiveness. (Bauman, Stein, and Ireys, 1991) For example, the intervention successfully presented to teenagers in a suburban high school health class in Johnson County, Kansas, might not be useful for an after-school program director working with teenagers attending an after-school program in Wyandotte County, Kansas. Census data indicate that Johnson County's population is 91.1% white and 2.6% black or African American and Wyandotte County's population is 58.2% and 28.3% respectively. Johnson County's children in poverty rate is 5.4% and Wyandotte's is 27.6%. Although the counties are adjacent, they are, in some ways, worlds apart.

The Healthy Places Framework supports the assertion that the place in which the intervention is presented helps determine the intervention's effectiveness. Community and place leaders with connections to the place and to the audience are most likely to be sensitive to issues unique to that place. For this reason, the Framework's decentralized diffusion system is structured to provide two-way communication between place leaders and leaders at other levels.

Click here to learn more about the Diffusion System.