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Lessons in population health from small-city Kansas
LAWRENCE — A new book from a University of Kansas professor and dean looks at how lifestyle behaviors and health indicators are associated with spatial planning and design factors in 36 small Kansas cities. “In essence, the relationship between population health and built environment seems to depend on how rural you are,” author Mahbub Rashid said. “And we should develop our design and planning guidelines for small cities with that in mind.”
Scientists may have cracked the ‘aging process’ in species
LAWRENCE — New research from the University of Kansas might resolve a mystery in the “aging process” in species — or, how a species’ risk of a going extinct changes after that species appears on the scene. The findings not only help make sense of the forces that shape the natural world but may be relevant for conservation efforts as species face increasing threats from climate change and habitat loss.
Study finds students, designers have different perceptions of masculine, feminine traits of classrooms
LAWRENCE — A new study from the University of Kansas finds that students and classroom designers had different perceptions of the masculine and feminine traits of classroom spaces and how those features influenced students’ sense of belonging — with potential to affect classroom engagement. The findings suggest that architects and designers cannot assume their designs and choices will resonate with others the way they do with themselves.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Lessons in population health from small-city Kansas
LAWRENCE — Mahbub Rashid sees cities differently than most people. And you might say the dean of the University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design ought to do that.
But Rashid has taken spatial analysis of urban development to the cutting edge of technology — and this view of small-town Kansas suggests to him that much more can be done to promote the health of people who live there.
Rashid’s new book, “Built Environment and Population Health in Small-Town America: Learning from Small Cities of Kansas” (Johns Hopkins University Press), looks at how lifestyle behaviors and health indicators are associated with spatial planning and design factors in 36 small Kansas cities with populations between 2,500 and 49,999.
Rashid measured the size and density of each city, its distance from a large city, its daytime population change and the average commuting time of its residents – and he found that all these factors seem to affect how population health is associated with the built environment there.
“A daily two-hour commute is not only a long time in the car, but it also decreases the time one has available to spend with family and friends by that amount,” Rashid said.
Increasing distance from large cities increases isolation — something that has become a reality in small towns with the loss of 20th century transportation options like bus and train service.
“In essence, the relationship between population health and built environment seems to depend on how rural you are,” Rashid said. “And we should develop our design and planning guidelines for small cities with that in mind.
“Having more grocery stores, a better food network or more sidewalks are all desirable to improve population health in small towns, but there may be other ways to accomplish the same ends. For instance, if we are able to reduce commute time to the nearby big city through better public transportation systems, then probably lifestyle will change for the better. People might use parks more, and, as a result, their health and relationships with others might improve.”
Rashid said he sympathized with the various headwinds confronting small-city planners and designers.
“These people are in a bind,” he said. “For reasons beyond their control, they can do very little to keep critical-access-care hospitals, which are often the economic engine of these small cities, from closing down. They can also do very little to get the transportation services these cities need. There is even a resistance, in some cases, to the external government funding that they need to accomplish anything at all. So you see a vicious cycle of decline in the built environment and population health here in these small cities.”
And yet the book cites a few success stories.
Rashid writes that for Baldwin City, rebuffing a big-box store helped save local merchants, preserve the vitality of its downtown and perhaps even some walkability that contributes to public health. And leaders of Montezuma, he said, “found the balance between the development of wind turbines and their economic interest.”
Rashid is a pioneer in studying population health in relation to the built environments of small cities. He said he hoped the book would offer support to those who care about the health of residents in small cities nationwide.
Rashid said that leaders of small cities should partner regionally to achieve critical mass and take public health into account in all their development decisions.
“Small towns studied in the book are not big enough to have a planner’s office,” Rashid said. “They may have one person who works as a liaison between the city government and the regional bodies. … So they will need to be a jack of all trades. They need a good understanding of the politics of the place and how to do public relations while applying appropriate planning tools for improving population health.
“A traditional urban-planning mindset may not work for small-town planning and design. And for this, we will need a planning education relevant to small towns.”
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
Scientists may have cracked the ‘aging process’ in species
LAWRENCE — New research from the University of Kansas might resolve a mystery in the “aging process” in species — or, how a species’ risk of a going extinct changes after that species appears on the scene.
For years, evolutionary biologists believed older species lacked any real advantage over younger ones in avoiding extinction — an idea known as “Red Queen theory” among researchers.
“The Red Queen theory is that species have to keep running just to stay still, like the character in Lewis Carroll’s book ‘Through the Looking-Glass,’” said lead author James Saulsbury, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at KU. “This idea was turned into a kind of ecological theory in the 1970s in an attempt to explain an observation that extinction risk didn’t seem to change over the lifespan of species.”
Yet the years have not been kind to this theory.
“In the earliest investigations of this phenomenon, species of all ages seemed to go extinct at about the same rate, perhaps just because of the relative crudeness of the evidence available at the time,” Saulsbury said. “This made sense under this Red Queen model, where species are constantly competing with other species that are also adapting alongside them.”
But as more data was collected and analyzed in more sophisticated ways, scientists increasingly found refutations of Red Queen theory.
“Scientists kept finding instances where young species are especially at risk of extinction,” Saulsbury said. “So we had a theory vacuum – a bunch of anomalous observations and no unified way of understanding them.”
But now, Saulsbury has led research appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that may resolve this mystery. Saulsbury and his co-authors showed the relationship between a species’ age and its risk of going extinct could be accurately predicted by an ecological model called the “neutral theory of biodiversity.”
Neutral theory is a simple model of ecologically similar species competing for limited resources, where the outcome for each species is more or less random.
In the theory, “Species either go extinct or expand from small initial population size to become less vulnerable to extinction, but they are always susceptible to being replaced by their competitors,” according to a lay summary of the PNAS paper. By extending this theory to make predictions for the fossil record, Saulsbury and colleagues found that neutral theory “predicts survivorship among fossil zooplankton with surprising accuracy and accounts for empirical deviations from the predictions of Red Queen more generally.”
Saulsbury’s co-authors were C. Tomomi Parins-Fukuchi of the University of Toronto, Connor Wilson of the University of Oxford and the University of Arizona, and Trond Reitan and Lee Hsiang Liow of the University of Oslo.
While neutral theory might seem to spell curtains for Red Queen theory, the KU researcher said Red Queen still has value. Mainly, it proposes the still valid idea that species compete in a zero-sum game against one another for finite resources, always battling for a bigger slice of nature’s pie.
“Red Queen theory has been a compelling and important idea in the evolutionary biological community, but the data from the fossil record no longer seems to support that theory,” Saulsbury said. “But I don’t think our paper really refutes this idea because, in fact, the Red Queen theory and the neutral theory are, in a deep way, pretty similar. They both present a picture of extinction happening as a result of competition between species for resources and of constant turnover in communities resulting from biological interactions.”
Ultimately, the findings not only help make sense of the forces that shape the natural world but may be relevant for conservation efforts as species face increasing threats from climate change and habitat loss around the globe.
“What makes a species vulnerable to extinction?” Saulsbury asked. “People are interested in learning from the fossil record whether it can tell us anything to help conserve species. The pessimistic side of our study is that there are ecological situations where there isn’t a whole lot of predictability in the fates of species; there’s some limit to how much we can predict extinction. To some extent, extinction will be decided by seemingly random forces — accidents of history. There’s some support for this in paleobiological studies.”
He said there has been effort to understand predictors of extinction in the fossil record, but not many generalities have emerged so far.
“There’s no trait that makes you immortal or not susceptible to extinction,” Saulsbury said. “But the optimistic side of our study is that entire communities can have patterns of extinction that are quite predictable and understandable. We can get a pretty good grasp on features of the biota, like how the extinction risk of species changes as they age. Even if the fate of a single species can be hard to predict, the fate of a whole community can be quite understandable.”
Saulsbury added a caveat: It remains to be seen how broadly the neutral explanation for extinction succeeds across different parts of the tree of life.
“Our study is also working on the geological timescale in millions of years,” he said. “Things may look very different on the timescale of our own lifetimes.”
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
Study finds students, designers have different perceptions of masculine, feminine traits of classrooms, influence on belonging
LAWRENCE — The way people interact with the built environment can influence whether they feel comfortable in a space or if they feel they belong among people who gather there. But the people who design learning spaces and those who use them might not feel the same about them.
A new study from the University of Kansas finds that students and classroom designers had different perceptions of the masculine and feminine traits of classroom spaces and how those features influenced students’ sense of belonging therein.
Researchers asked undergraduates and classroom design professionals about their perceptions of classrooms with design features classified as masculine and feminine, finding they had strong, opposite correlations between their perceptions of femininity and sense of belonging in the spaces. The authors said the findings emphasize the need for better understanding of how students perceive learning spaces and how learning spaces can foster a sense of belonging.
Studies have shown that how students perceive learning spaces influences their sense of belonging and that when they feel they belong they have better educational outcomes. But little work has been done on specific design features and how people perceive them as being associated with masculinity or femininity and how such traits influence their sense of belonging in classes conducted in the rooms that include them. In two new studies, researchers surveyed undergraduates and design professionals about their reactions to four learning spaces.
“We say masculine and feminine and those conjure images in people’s minds, but not necessarily the same images from person to person,” said Michael Ralph, vice president and director of research with Multistudio, one of the study’s authors. “When we asked students and designers about the same spaces, we didn’t see a small difference in perception. Their thoughts were very different. I think that emphasizes there is an important personal component about how we interact with these spaces.”
Cheryl Wright, lecturer specializing in best practices in learning in KU’s School of Education & Human Sciences and a study co-author, said she regularly sees the difference a classroom makes in how students engage with a class. When students learn about polarizing topics that can be personally or politically charged, those who are not comfortable in the space may not feel like they belong in a discussion.
“We definitely want to have interactions and dialogue where people feel safe. We don’t just mean physically safe, but safe to share their thoughts,” Wright said. “On topics that are difficult to discuss, the space in which they learn is critical.”
The researchers addressed their questions in two studies. For the first, they collected data from undergraduates at five institutions of higher education across the United States. In the second, they collected data from professionals at design firms across the United States and Canada.
Respondents were asked to share their reactions to four computer-generated images of classrooms meant to strongly evoke masculinity with features such as black and white color palettes and angular/linear space features or femininity with soft colors, additional windows, curvilinear tables and shifts away from dark woods. Other spaces incorporated those features to a lesser extent.
Respondents were shown one of the four spaces at random and asked how much they felt 14 one-word prompts were associated with the shown space. They were then asked four questions about how much they felt they would belong in that space. Results showed the students’ perceptions of feminine traits in the rooms coincided with a higher sense of belonging, but perceptions of femininity among professionals coincided with the opposite — a lower sense of belonging.
The study, written by Ralph, Wright, Julia Pascutto, design director with Lemay x FLDWORK, a Canadian design firm; and Rebecca Pedrosa Martinez, a designer at Multistudio during the study, was published in the Journal of Interior Design.
The authors said that student respondents who reported feeling a sense of belonging in the more feminine spaces was represented across genders.
The authors also found that there was not antagonism toward the more masculine spaces, or responses of feeling that they would not belong there — only that their sense of belonging was higher when they perceived more femininity in a space.
The fact that students and design professionals had opposite reactions in terms of their perceptions of the class environments shows that architects, designers and others who shape and create learning environments for others cannot assume their designs and choices will resonate with others the way they do with themselves. And those choices could potentially reinforce negative hierarchies or make some students feel unwelcome or uncomfortable, Ralph said.
For their part, educators are often assigned a room in which to hold their classes and cannot control design elements such as how many windows a room has, their placement, paint colors or if furniture is affixed in place. However, they can influence how students interact with each other and teachers in a space, such as encouraging collaborative groups or moving furniture to encourage discussion when possible.
“A sense of belonging has to be intentional. I want students to have a transformational education,” Wright said. “Students come in with different backgrounds and life experiences. For me, it is critical that we form a sense of belonging. And my students have said they feel more comfortable discussing controversial or difficult issues in spaces that facilitate them.”
The study also adds to a body of research showing that students will select to take certain classes based on the type of room it is offered in, that women tend to prefer active learning spaces to traditional lecture halls and similar studies Ralph and KU colleagues have conducted.
“We want to learn more about what we can do to make a difference in design, in terms of learning spaces, student housing and across the built environment and what makes good design that helps students feel like they belong,” Ralph said.
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