“Neighborhood Environments as Socio-Techno-bio Systems: Water Quality, Public Trust, and Health in Mexico City (NESTSMX)” is an NSF-funded four-year collaborative interdisciplinary project that brings together experts in environmental engineering, anthropology, and environmental health from the University of Michigan and the Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública. The PI is Elizabeth Roberts (anthropology), and the co-PIs are Brisa N. Sánchez (biostatistics), Martha M Téllez-Rojo (public health), Branko Kerkez (environmental engineering), and Krista Rule Wigginton (civil and environmental engineering).
Our overarching goal for NESTSMX is to develop methods for understanding neighborhoods as “socio-techno-bio systems” and how these systems relate to people’s trust in (or distrust of) their water. In the process, we will collectively contribute to our respective fields of study. But we also see this as an experiment in how to work with, and write for, colleagues from different disciplinary backgrounds.
NESTSMX works with families living in Mexico City, participants in ELEMENT (Early Life Exposures in Mexico to ENvironmental Toxicants): an ongoing longitudinal birth-cohort chemical-exposure study. Our research involves ethnography and environmental engineering fieldwork with these families, which we will combine with biological data previously gathered by ELEMENT. Our focus will be on the infrastructures and social structures that move water in and out of neighborhoods, households, and bodies.
Through its socio-techno-bio methodology NESTSMX will offer important new tools to examine the general and specific neighborhood environments that contribute to social, environmental, and health inequalities in contemporary Mexico, tools that can then be extrapolated to other settings.
The socio-techno-bio methodology will be developed through three phases:
1) Neighborhood Audits (January 2019–August 2019). We will conduct intensive neighborhood audits from 15 selected ELEMENT participant neighborhoods, focusing on the production of trust in water infrastructures, water quality, and levels of social cohesion and security. The audits will include fine-grained ethnographic and engineering observations of neighborhoods, household water management and use, and household health status.
2) Neighborhood Assessments (May 2020–September 2020). With the ethnographic, environmental engineering, and epidemiological data collected from the Neighborhood Audits we will develop systematic neighborhood measures allowing us to place quicker and more general assessments of ELEMENT neighborhoods on a multidimensional numerical scale.
3) Neighborhood Multidimensional Analysis (September 2020–September 2021). We will pose and test novel hypotheses regarding associations between newly acquired neighborhood audit and assessment data and behavioral and biological data from ELEMENT participants.
Our aim is not to construct a static quantifiable measure that can be used to study any single complex phenomenon. Rather, we seek to develop a systematic method for investigating and linking the dynamic specificities of how built environments, behaviors, and biological processes constantly shape and reshape each other. This method will be shared publicly to enable other researchers to replicate our approach.