Szapoznik, J., Spokane, A. R., Lombard, J., Martinez, F., Mason, C.A., Brown, S. C., Cruza-Guet, M. C., Brandt-Greenfeld, R. (2005). Designing Healthy Communities: The Culture-Centered Science of Built Environment, Behavior and Health. In S Quareshi (ed). Reimagining West Coconut Grove. Washington DC: Spacemaker.

The West Coconut Grove Project, the topic of the present volume, is a powerful example of the culture-sensitive redesign of urban ethnic communities. This novel project preserves and restores the character of West Coconut Grove, a predominantly Caribbean urban enclave. An interdisicplinary undertaking, the Coconut Grove project incorporates the views of architecture, law, medicine, history, art, and communications and parallels intervention trends in the social, behavioral and medical sciences which are increasingly conducted from a culture-centered (Szapocznik & Kurtines, 1993), or culture-sensitive perspective (Pick, Poortinga, & Givaudan, 2003). This culture-sensitive approach implies that when designing or redesigning communities planners incorporate the increasingly clear, fundamental, differences in the social processes characteristic of different cultures (Ji, Peng, & Nisbett, 2000). New findings on the centrality of these cultural differences now requires that community interventions weight these socio-cultural factors as heavily, if not more heavily, than considerations in community design (Pick et. al., 2003). There is, in such projects, then, an imperative for close collaboration with community organizations and courageous individual residents who represent those cultures in the community.

The inclusion of built environment features and characteristics that reflect the culture of origin of residents recreates an environment familiar and supportive of their cultural uniqueness. As this chapter will show, the interaction of the built environment and the social environment of a neighborhood can affect both the physical and the mental health of its residents.