CAREER: Traffic Injuries, Urbanization, and Infrastructural Development

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

A key feature of urbanization worldwide is intensified traffic, and along with it, an ever-increasing number of traffic-related injuries. Traffic-related injuries are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality globally, yet little is known about the social contexts, causes, and consequences of the problem. This project will examine the ways that traffic associated with modern urban life relates to bodily injury among urban residents. The project will provide new insights regarding how traffic and its injuries interrelate as well as how injuries distribute unequally across a city and across different types of mobility. The project also has a significant educational component that will train both undergraduate and graduate students. Educational activities include courses and student-led experiential research related to automobile accidents in the US. The project has several significant broader contributions to society. It will create several US-India connections through research and education linkages between Duke University and research groups in Mumbai, India. The data gleaned from the research can inform and advance policy in urban development and health by offering researchers and officials insights into the factors that shape traffic injuries and thus potential avenues for their reduction. With the support of a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, Dr. Harris Solomon (Duke University) will undertake a five-year study of the medical impacts of rapid urban infrastructural development. Current studies of the social aspects of urban mobility generally approach traffic as a phenomenon that people enter and leave at will. Dr. Solomon will undertake research from a different perspective that poses traffic as something that can leave lasting effects on the body. The field research will be conducted in Mumbai, India, one of the world's most populous cities where traffic-related accidents have become one of the leading causes of injury and death. Ethnographic methods of participant observation and interviews will be employed across three key sites: a middle-class neighborhood where public and private transportation is a regular feature of daily life; trauma wards of local hospitals where traffic-related injuries are treated; and offices of traffic scientists and civil engineers whose plans for managing the city both affect and are affected by traffic accidents. These data will allow the researcher to better understand possible relations among urban density, experiences of injuries, and the ways people accommodate the necessity of moving through a city even as that movement comes at considerable risk to their well-being.