摘要：We measured dynamic stress responses using ambulatory heart rate monitoring as participants in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania walked past vacant lots before and after a greening remediation treatment of randomly selected lots. Being in view of a greened vacant lot decreased heart rate significantly more than did being in view of a nongreened vacant lot or not in view of any vacant lot. Remediating neighborhood blight may reduce stress and improve health. Vacant lots are abandoned parcels of urban land that signal blight, with overgrown vegetation, trash dumping, and other illegal activities. Exposure to these lots is associated with negative health outcomes. 1–7 Although complex social and economic factors broadly explain the relationship between neighborhood blight and health, limited experimentation with biological outcomes has been conducted in real-world settings. 8 The body’s stress response is a reasonable biological pathway for understanding the impact of neighborhood blight on health. 9,10 Although this response is protective in acute situations, permanent downstream inflammatory changes and dysregulation of cardiovascular, neurological, and endocrine systems accumulate over a lifetime for persons repeatedly exposed to stressors in their neighborhood surroundings. 11–16 Basic structural improvements to blighted neighborhood environments, such as “greening” vacant lots, offers a promising and sustainable, yet underused, solution to such stressors. 5,17 We examined the microspatial impact of neighborhood physical conditions during short neighborhood walks by experimentally testing a specific condition (the remediation of blighted vacant land) to a dynamic biological marker (heart rate). 18–21 Using georeferenced heart rate monitoring in an experimental study of an individual’s native environment is a unique approach to field studies of neighborhood blight on acute stress. 22
