Energy, Environment, and Health

Introduction

The design of the environments where we live, go to school/work, and spend our recreational time are greatly shaping who we are as individuals and the communities we are a part of. With the average American spending approximately 90 percent of their time indoors ¹, the design our homes, schools, and offices are greatly impacting the health choices we make and the interactive experiences we have. From proximity to healthy foods to eat or the quality of the air that we breathe, our built environment is making many of those choices for us.

Some of us spend our lives in built environments that were designed well before we came to inhabit them and often there is very little we can do to alter them to meet our changing individual and community needs. In Emeryville California, the city where I teach, we are getting a chance to redesign an important part of our built environment; our public K-12 school.

Emeryville is a small 1.2 square mile urban community with a population of approximately 10,000 residents ² nestled in between the cities of Oakland and Berkeley, and at the base of the Bay Bridge across from San Francisco. A flood of state redevelopment funding over the past decade has brought several tech companies, big box stores, a shopping mall, and luxury lofts to replace the abandoned industrial warehouses of Emeryville's past. The new commerce and housing have greatly improved serious economic and safety issues that had plagued Emeryville for decades. However the new development in the city greatly contrasts with the experiences of my students and their families, many of which have lived in Emeryville and neighboring West Oakland for several generations. According to the 2010 US Census, the average household size in Emeryville is 1.68 persons. The shift in new luxury housing geared toward adults without children has forced many of our families to seek housing on the eastern, and older, edge of the city or in neighboring Oakland and Berkeley.

In spite of Emeryville's newer residents tending not to have children, the city's voters have passed a tax measure dedicated to the redevelopment and construction of a new educational and community center called the Emeryville Center for Community Life (ECCL). The ECCL will be built on the site of our current high school and will become the home of a new K-12 school, athletic fields, community health services, senior center, and Emeryville's first public library.

With community forums and design work underway, the opportunity for my students to examine the phases of the design process and explore what it means to create a facility that promotes healthy living in an urban environment through the lens of the ECCL project will become an authentic design challenge and powerful learning experience.

I believe his unit will challenge my students on several levels by asking them to tap into their prior artistic knowledge and design experiences, while deepening their investigative research skills. Throughout this unit I will ask my students to examine issues of environmental health as they pertain to the design of the ECCL. It will be essential for them to think critically as artists, community members, and seekers of environmental justice as they tackle the realistic challenge of designing a facility that meets the many needs of a large group of diverse users. My hope is that this integration will not only deepen my students artistic critical thinking and problem solving skills, but will also help develop the 21 ^st Century Skills ³ around communication, creativity, information, media, and technology that they will need in their years beyond high school.