The above properties make ACHUNAS useful to assess, first, where significant nature situations are, and, second, how children connect to nature. Below, we give two hypothetical examples of assessments that operationalize ACHUNAS to exemplify its use in assessing child-nature-connecting environments.

#### Hypothetical Examples of Assessments Using ACHUNAS

ACHUNAS can be used, for example, to assess the extent and type of "extinction of experiences" that many authors also believe undermines children's well-being (Soga and Gaston, 2016; Soga et al., 2016) and interest in nature conservation (Miller, 2005; Samways, 2007; Finch, 2008). Such assessments could be performed by using participatory observations, interviews, or PPGIS methodologies to examine which qualities of SNS exist, and which do not, in the everyday landscape of children. As an example, take an urban park in which children are freely allowed to play. Each item in the lists of qualities of SNS can be independently assessed according to the nature situations that are available in the park (see the assessment example "playing in the park" in **Figure 6**). In this hypothetical example, the evaluator has spent time in the park performing participatory observations of children describing nature activities with high levels of "entertainment," but low levels of "thoughtprovocation." Overall, the observations show that the nature situations available in this park are mostly characterized by the qualities of "child-driven" and "physical" activities with high "engagement of senses." The evaluator then decides to interview children to understand their ability of "feeling comfortable in natural spaces," "being curious about nature," and so on. Once completed, the assessment provides the evaluator with useful information about what kind of nature experiences exist in the park, and, importantly, which ones are missing. In this example, the evaluator might conclude that organized activities and the introduction of animals might further nurture children's ability of "knowing about nature," or "feeling attached to natural spaces." In the above example, ACHUNAS specifies the list of criteria that the evaluator should follow to assess the environment, but the methods to do this (e.g., participatory observations and interviews) are chosen by the evaluator. For a more complete assessment, the evaluator might also consider principle 3 of ACHUNAS (i.e., children's HNC progresses over time through diverse nature routines) and assess how frequently children visit the park and how long they have exposure to nature activities for, or perform the same assessment for all the parks of a neighborhood or a city.

A second example of how ACHUNAS can be used is in the assessment of educational nature activities. This type of implementation would be particularly useful to educational programs connecting children to nature (see the assessment example "gardening" in **Figure 6**). Qualitative and/or quantitative methods such as interviews, observations, and questionnaires could be applied to study the presence and extent of the different qualities of SNS and abilities of HNC. In this hypothetical example, the project aims to teach children how to grow their own food, and researchers use a questionnaire to ask practitioners to rank how important each of the qualities of SNS are when children garden (this example has strong similarities with the assessment exercise performed by professionals in the survey). The final assessment shows that while gardening "thought-provocation" and "social/cultural endorsement" are high, but that "entertainment" is low. By interviewing the children, researchers also find that despite children being able to "take care of nature" their level of ability to "be curious about nature" while gardening is low. Researchers would conclude that gardening, as it is performed by this educational program, is likely to be insufficiently entertaining to nurture children's curiosity about nature. Researchers might then recommend that practitioners introduce an element of play during gardening activities, or to foster children's sense of belonging to the garden by making them choose a name for different sections of the garden. As in the previous example, ACHUNAS provides the lists of qualities of SNS and abilities of HNC which should be assessed, and the researchers select the method in which to do so (e.g., questionnaires and interviews). Using ACHUNAS in this way allows practitioners to develop more holistic and comprehensive nature activities, and it helps to bridge the gap between theory and practice that constitute a major obstacle in current environmental education (Chawla and Cushing, 2007; Finch, 2008; Nazir and Pedretti, 2016).

#### Comprehensiveness, Transferability, and Practicality

Of the 275 professionals responding to the survey (from more than 200 organizations in 22 countries), 74% considered the list of sixteen qualities of SNS to be "very" or "fully comprehensive" to assess all the qualities of nature activities that connect children to nature. During the survey, every single quality of SNS listed was considered "very important" or "essential" to assess a considerable percentage of nature activities that have the potential to connect children to nature; from 35% for "involvement of animals" to 78% for "engagement of senses" (**Figure 1**). The same can be said for the list of abilities that constitute children's HNC. The list of abilities of HNC was found to be at least "somewhat comprehensive" by 99.3% of the professionals responding our survey with the majority of professionals (63%) stating that it was "very comprehensive." Additionally, a large majority of respondents agreed that every single ability of HNC listed indicated some form of connection to nature in children; from 79% agreeing with "being one with nature" to 92% agreeing with "being curious about nature" (**Figure 3**). These results, the mixed-method methodology, and the heterogeneous group of professionals ensure that the lists of qualities of SNS and abilities of HNC generated in this paper are sufficiently comprehensive of all relations that indicate children's HNC, transferable across different children and cultures, and can be practically implemented by practitioners and researchers in order to identify where children's SNS are.

#### Limitations of ACHUNAS

We identify three limitations of ACHUNAS to assess childnature-connecting environments. The first limitation is the completeness and generalizability of ACHUNAS. 63% of professionals found the abilities of HNC "very comprehensive" and 67% of them thought the same for qualities of SNS, but only 7% of them found these lists to be "fully comprehensive." This shows that ACHUNAS might not yet integrate all the qualities that can categorize an environment as more or less child-nature-connecting and, therefore, the lists of qualities of SNS and abilities of HNC require formal validation. Further

FIGURE 6 | Assessment framework for Children's Human Nature Situations (ACHUNAS). ACHUNAS comprises the list of qualities of SNS, the list of children's abilities of human-nature connection, and three guiding principles. The figure shows the hypothetical assessment of two SNS (playing in the park and gardening) with different configurations of qualities of SNS and abilities of HNC.

research is required to test the lists for convergence or divergence. For generalizability, cross-cultural assessments are needed to understand if certain qualities of SNS and abilities of HNC are more suitable than others to assess specific sociocultural contexts. Despite having tested ACHUNAS on a very international and heterogeneous group of respondents, the framework lacks the contributions of non-English speaking professionals and the potentially valuable input from indigenous communities.

Second, because of the nature of ACHUNAS, the framework does not suggest which method is the most suitable to assess each item in the lists. ACHUNAS highlights what to assess, but it does not provide guidance on how to assess childnature-connectedness. Comparability across assessments that operationalize ACHUNAS with different methodologies might, therefore, be limited. Defining standard operationalizations of ACHUNAS through trandisciplinary collaborations would greatly increase the comparability of results across different socio-environmental contexts.

Third, ACHUNAS is a framework built upon professionals' understanding of children's HNC. The results are therefore a representation of a multitude of adults' perspectives and lack the direct input of children's insights. In order to further improve the validity of ACHUNAS as a framework, interviews of children and self-reporting methodologies performed with children can be implemented to better integrate children's perspectives into the ACHUNAS framework. In pursuing this endeavor, we also see the potential contribution of children with differing sociodemographic backgrounds.

### Future Research Directions for Child-Nature-Connecting Environments

We identified three future research directions that have great potential to promote the design of nature-connecting human habitats or to inform educational curricula that promote children's HNC. The most obvious is operationalizing ACHUNAS to assess where and how children connect to nature. Implementing standard operationalizations of ACHUNAS would allow understanding which relations of children's abilities of HNC and socio-environmental features afford qualities of SNS. This would be a further step forward in unveiling the ecological properties that can categorize an environment as more or less child-nature-connecting. Furthermore, such knowledge would be a stepping stone toward the design of nature-connecting human habitats.

A second area of research of fundamental importance is the analysis of interdependencies between qualities of SNS and abilities of HNC. The fundamental unit of analysis in ACHUNAS is at the confluence of children's abilities of HNC, qualities of SNS, and the socio-environmental context. The results shown above already indicated that certain configurations of qualities of SNS significantly relate to certain abilities of HNC (see **Table 3**). However, the current understanding of these linkages are preliminary and they lack temporal dimensions such as frequency or duration. A better understanding of the effects that routinized sets of qualities of SNS have on children's abilities of HNC would better inform the design of nature-connecting human habitats as well as pedagogical curricula that aim to connect children to nature.

Lastly, it is plausible that children's HNC may vary not just in relation to SNS and nature routines, but also with respect to the child's cognitive, emotional, moral, and physical stages of development. Although this has not been the goal of this paper, we recognize that studying the progression of HNC in relation to children's stages of development is a promising area of research that could directly promote comprehensive and holistic curricula to nurture children's HNC. For the sake of facilitating such academic endeavor, we believe that Piaget's stages of development (Piaget, 1960), Vygotsky's theory of Zones of Proximal Development (Chaiklin, 2003), Bronfenbrenner's theory of child development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), situated and social learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991), and embodied cognition (Chemero, 2009) might be useful theories to investigate some of these unknowns.

### Implications for Sustainable Urban Design and Environmental Education

The results of this study have obvious implications for the practice of sustainable urban design and environmental education. It is common for urban green infrastructure to be promoted and developed for biophysical management, e.g., stormwater management, flood control, urban cooling, reduction in carbon emissions etc., but its role in the development of children's HNC has been so far largely ignored. For example, access rights, spatial accessibility, ecological and biological diversity are just some of the variables of the green infrastructure that can promote children's nature routines and their HNC; all of which are already intentionally designed in the human habitat. Whether intentional or incidental, recurring experiences of nature situated in the everyday habitat of children are opportunities to develop their abilities of HNC (Giusti et al., 2014; Marcus et al., 2016; Beery et al., 2017; Samuelsson et al., 2017). Nature-based solutions provide direct benefits for public health, improve living conditions, and build resilience to climate and environmental change (Colding and Barthel, 2013; Hartig and Kahn, 2016). The results of this study show that they can also be considered in sustainable urban design for the transgenerational establishment of sustainable futures.

As environmental educators have already acknowledged, promoting children's HNC also means facilitating frequent nature activities and the results of this study confirm this position (Chawla and Cushing, 2007; Finch, 2008; Nazir and Pedretti, 2016). ACHUNAS offers the possibility to assess the significance of such frequent nature activities, to compare them, to identify which phase of HNC progression children are in, or to better tailor nature activities to suit the intended educational ability of HNC. In so doing, ACHUNAS is a first step toward the assessment of best practices to nurture children's HNC across organizations, cultures, and geographical locations. More broadly, assessing nature activities using ACHUNAS provides a preliminary form of curricula evaluation when the pedagogical goal is to connect children to nature. Conclusive monitoring

methods developed from the ACHUNAS framework would allow reliable comparison within and across programs and the identification of discrepancies between intended and effective outcomes. This is a stepping stone to understand if such programs have potential to nurture future sustainable personal and collective behaviors. In summary, we believe ACHUNAS is a step forward in creating a reliable pedagogical curriculum capable of connecting children to nature.

ACHUNAS is a starting point for cross-fertilization between different disciplines interested in child-nature-connectedness. The academic literature on HNC has been systematically divided into epistemological silos (Ives et al., 2017), but the embodied approach to HNC used for ACHUNAS provides fertile ground to integrate, extend, and apply these different branches of empirical evidence. Several abilities of HNC in ACHUNAS such as "feeling comfortable in," "feeling attached to," "recalling memories in," and "caring about" natural spaces are also founding elements of sense of place literature in human geography (Hernández et al., 2007; Lewicka, 2011). On the other hand, "knowing about nature" and to an extent "being one with it" are recognized components of modern environmental education (Nazir and Pedretti, 2016). The embodied nature of ACHUNAS allows these established disciplinary grounds to be brought together and set side by side with professionals' understanding of children's HNC. The use of ACHUNAS will allow these disciplines to gain further practical application and provide practitioners with the possibility to draw on the solidity of peer-reviewed literature.

### CONCLUSION

In this study, through the use of inductive thematic analysis and a practitioner survey we identified and tested three components of an Assessment framework for Children's Human Nature Situations that we called ACHUNAS (**Figure 6**). First, we identified 16 qualities of SNS that characterize a nature situation with the potential to "connect" children to nature. Second, we documented a list of 10 abilities of human-nature connection that expresses the nuances of children's human-nature connection. Third, we defined three principles that frame the applicability of these lists: (1) significant nature situations are various and with differing consequences for children's human-nature connection; (2) children's human-nature connection is a complex embodied ability; and (3) children's human-nature connection progresses over time through diverse nature routines. Together, these findings form a comprehensive framework that outline what to quantify or qualify when assessing "child-nature connecting" environments.

### REFERENCES

Questions like "where children connect with nature?" and "what kind of nature experiences are missing from cities?" are central to the design of nature-connecting human habitats as much as to the generation of sustainable futures. ACHUNAS is sufficiently comprehensive, transferable, and practical to provide a starting point to answer these questions and to guide the assessment of where and how children connect to nature. It can be operationalized to assess the extent and typology of "extinction of experience" and inspire the design of naturebased human habitats that also connect children and people to nature. Similarly, it can be used to evaluate curricula that aim to connect children to nature, providing useful information to such educational programs. Overall, ACHUNAS is a transdisciplinary framework that allows cross-fertilization and integration of knowledge across different academic disciplines and makes it useful to practitioners interested in promoting child-natureconnecting environments and children's HNC. In conclusion, ACHUNAS provides a starting point to classify a social-ecological system as more or less child-nature-connecting.

### ETHICS STATEMENT

This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations "ESPA Ethics Principles and Procedure" produced by the Directorate of the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation, with written informed consent from all subjects. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the ethical committee at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

MG: Work conception, research design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, paper arrangement and revision, writing, and submission; US: Data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, paper arrangement and revision, and writing; CR: Data interpretation, research design, paper arrangement and revision, and writing; TB: Data interpretation, paper arrangement and revision, and writing.

### ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wish to thank Elena Dawkins for insightful discussions and feedback on earlier versions of the paper, Cheryl Charles for facilitating the empirical investigation, and the two reviewers for their invaluable inputs.

Stable Are These Attitudes and Which Comes First? Eur. Rev. Appl. Psychol. 64, 269–77. doi: 10.1016/j.erap.2014.09.001

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2018 Giusti, Svane, Raymond and Beery. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Residents' Dissatisfaction and All-Cause Mortality. Evidence from 74 European Cities

#### Ana I. Ribeiro1 \*, Sílvia Fraga1 and Henrique Barros 1, 2

1 Epidemiology Research Unit—Instituto de Saúde Pública, Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal, 2 Departamento de Ciências da Saúde Pública e Forenses e Educação Médica, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal

Background: About 2/3 of the Europeans reside in cities. Thus, we must expand our knowledge on how city characteristics affect health and well-being. Perceptions about cities' resources and functioning might be related with health, as they capture subjective experiences of the residents. We characterized the health status of 74 European cities, using all-cause mortality as indicator, and investigated the association of mortality with residents' dissatisfaction with key domains of urban living.

#### Edited by:

Stephan Barthel, Gävle University College, Sweden

#### Reviewed by:

Sjerp De Vries, Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands Bernardo Hernández, Universidad de La Laguna, Spain Sanna Ala-Mantila, Aalto University, Finland

> \*Correspondence: Ana I. Ribeiro<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Environmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 29 May 2017 Accepted: 20 December 2017 Published: 09 January 2018

#### Citation:

Ribeiro AI, Fraga S and Barros H (2018) Residents' Dissatisfaction and All-Cause Mortality. Evidence from 74 European Cities. Front. Psychol. 8:2319. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02319 Methods: We considered 74 European cities from 29 countries. Aggregated data on residents' dissatisfaction was obtained from the Flash Eurobarometer, Quality of life in European cities (2004–2015). For each city a global dissatisfaction score and a dissatisfaction score by domain (environment, social, economic, healthcare, and infrastructures/services) were calculated. Data on mortality and population was obtained from the Eurostat. Standardized Mortality Ratios, SMR, and 95% Confidence Intervals (95% CI) were calculated. The association between dissatisfaction scores and SMR was estimated using Generalized Linear Models.

Results: SMR varied markedly (range: 73.2–146.5), being highest in Eastern Europe and lowest in the South and Western European cities. Residents' dissatisfaction levels also varied greatly. We found a significant association between city SMR and residents' dissatisfaction with healthcare (β = 0.334; IC 95% 0.030–0.639) and social environment (β = 0.239; IC 95% 0.015–0.464). No significant association was found with the dissatisfaction scores related with the physical and economic environment and the infrastructures/services.

Conclusions: We found a significant association between city levels of mortality and residents' dissatisfaction with certain urban features, suggesting subjective assessments can be also used to comprehend urban health.

Keywords: urban health, city planning, European Union, physical environment, health services, socioeconomic environment, community participation

## INTRODUCTION

Urbanization is probably one of the most important demographic phenomena of our times (Galea and Vlahov, 2005). Currently, about two thirds of the Europeans and more than half of the world population reside in cities (WB, 2014). Thus, more than ever, we must expand our knowledge about how city characteristics affect the health and well-being of the urbanites (Galea et al., 2005). An

**65**

healthy city is "one that is continually creating and improving those physical and social environments and expanding those community resources which enable people to mutually support each other in performing all the functions of life and developing to their maximum potential" (WHO-EUROPE, 1995), which, ultimately, promotes human health and urban sustainability (Portney and Sansom, 2017). This multifaceted definition implies that cities must offer health-supportive physical and socioeconomic environments and adequate access to infrastructures and services, which, according to several conceptual models, represent the main determinants of population health within urban contexts (Galea and Vlahov, 2005). Altering affordances of the physical and social environment can contribute to reduce the stress and unhealthy behaviors associated with urban living, to the restoration of depleted cognitive resources and, by this means, promote a healthy Biosphere (Hartig and Kahn, 2016).

City government plays an enormous role in changing several of these affordances and urban planning can be seen as a form of "preventive medicine" (Corburn, 2015). Indeed, for centuries the most important public health actions started in large urban areas and this trend might accentuate with the increasing decentralization that has brought more power to the local governments (Lawrence, 2013), which deal with a network of city actors/organizations (civil society, corporates, trade unions, informal organizations) and, at same time, cope with the decisions of the central state's agencies (Devas, 2001). To design healthy cities and to motivate planners toward this goal it is crucial to include the civil society, to monitor the current state of population's health, and to take into consideration the residents' opinions about the cities' resources and functioning (Frankish et al., 2002; Hogan et al., 2015). As stated by Burrows and Rhodes in 1998 "we need to move from assuming what is best for people to letting them say what they think would be better" (Burrows and Rhodes, 1998).

Cities, per definition, share some characteristics. Yet, due to distinct geographic situation, size, and cultural and historical background, European cities are very unequal in terms of physical and socioeconomic environments. These specificities might shape the indicators of health and well-being of these cities and, by this means, might create an unequal distribution of health. Health inequalities across European regions have been largely documented (Richardson et al., 2014; Ribeiro et al., 2016), but few studies systematically evaluated the differences in health status across European cities (Gray et al., 2012; Richardson et al., 2017) or explored the determinants of such differences (Richardson et al., 2017). Those determinants are likely to be heterogeneous and difficult to grasp. Despite much attention given to objective measures about the cities environment [pollution (Beelen et al., 2014), greenness (Gascon et al., 2016), socioeconomic deprivation (Marí-Dell'Olmo et al., 2015)], perceptions about the places might also influence and inform on other dimensions of people's health, as they capture subjective experiences of the residents, something that traditional, objectively measured indicators cannot. Subjective assessments capture the "human perception of space" (i.e., place) improving our the understanding of the urban environment and of the population preferences and dislikes (McCrea et al., 2006; Kothencz et al., 2015). Individual perceptions are derived from filtering objective characteristics through standards of evaluation, which depend on past experiences, aspirations, and personal characteristics (John, 1987). By this means, objective attributes become subjective and lead to a certain degree of satisfaction (John, 1987; Amérigo and Aragonés, 1997; McCrea et al., 2006).

A handful of studies, conducted at individual-level, have reported that residents' satisfaction with cities' resources and functioning is related with health outcomes. In 2012, after inquiring over 5550 Taiwanese youth, Shiue found that satisfaction with neighborhood environment was associated with self-rated health (Shiue, 2012). More recently, Hogan and colleagues evaluated the relationship between happiness levels and city environment. After analyzing data from 5,000 adults aged 25–85 years old living in Berlin, Paris, London, New York, and Toronto, they found that younger adult's happiness levels were associated with having easy access to cultural, shopping, transport, parks and sport amenities and the attractiveness of their cities, whereas, among the older participants, it was more strongly associated with the provision of quality governmental services (Hogan et al., 2016). Perceived neighborhood safety and social environment, specifically, have been often associated with self-rated health (Wen et al., 2006; Kim et al., 2013; Assari et al., 2015), health-related quality of life (Parra et al., 2010), mental illness (Polling et al., 2014), and stroke risk (Kim et al., 2013). And, it is important to highlight that some of these studies confirmed that this association remained significant after accounting for objective measures (Wen et al., 2006; Kim et al., 2014) and one have found that perceived measures, rather than objective ones, have a bigger impact over the studied outcomes (Polling et al., 2014).

Residents' ratings about city resources and functioning have been regularly collected at request of European Union through large Europe-wide surveys (EU, 2016) and might constitute a convenient and informative data source to characterize European cities from that point of view. Although some evidence exists that perceived urban characteristics are associated with individuals' health, so far those datasets remain underexplored and underutilized. Thus, the present study aimed (i) to characterize the health status of 74 European cities, using as indicator all-cause mortality, and (ii) to investigate whether mortality levels are associated with the residents' dissatisfaction with five key domains of urban living: physical, social and economic environment, healthcare, and infrastructures/services.

### MATERIALS AND METHODS

#### Data

All data was obtained at city-level. A city is a local administrative unit where the majority of the population lives in an urban center of at least 50,000 inhabitants (EUROSTAT, 2016).

Data on residents' dissatisfaction was obtained from the Flash Eurobarometer, "Quality of life in European cities" (EU, 2016). This survey has been conducted since 2004 every 3 years at the request of the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy to get a snapshot of people's opinions on a range of urban issues. Surveys were conducted in 2004, 2006, 2009, 2012, and 2015. The latest survey covered 79 European cities plus four greater cities (greater city is an approximation of the urban centers when this stretches far beyond the administrative city boundaries, EUROSTAT, 2017) and inquired a total of 41,000 citizens.

Although the type and number of items vary by year and country, this survey includes roughly 55 items, covering issues as diverse as employment, environment, housing, transport, culture, city services, and immigration (**Table 1**).

To obtain an overall picture of the residents' dissatisfaction in each city, a global dissatisfaction score and dissatisfaction scores by domain were constructed, according to the following steps:

Because not all cities had complete information on both residents' dissatisfaction and mortality, we included only those with complete information, a total of 74 European cities from 29 countries pertaining to four European regions—Western (n = 32 cities), Southern (n = 15), Northern (n = 10), and Eastern Europe (n = 17) (EUROVOC, 2016). These four regions are characterized by different political, socioeconomic and cultural environments (Vågerö, 2010).

Data on mortality and population were obtained from the Eurostat database for the latest year available (mostly 2013). Total counts of deaths for each city were obtained, as well as deaths by sex and age group for the EU-28, which was used as reference to calculate Standardized Mortality Ratios (SMR) and corresponding 95% Confidence Intervals (95% CI).

TABLE 1 | Items from the Quality of life in European cities survey included in the creation of the summary scores of resident's dissatisfaction (n = 50).

### Statistical Analysis

Generalized Linear Models (Gaussian) were used to estimate the association between the SMR in each city and residents' dissatisfaction scores. We fitted four different models. First, we measured the bivariate associations between each dissatisfaction score, European region and the SMR (Model 0). Model 1 includes only the SMR and the variable "European Region." In Model 2, dissatisfaction scores were added simultaneously, and successively removed, so that only predictors that made a significant unique contribution were retained. Finally, Model 3 is the same as Model 2, but adjusted for European regions.

It is important to refer that the role of the variable "European Region" was explored because it was clearly associated with both mortality and dissatisfaction and it was not in the pathway between the two, so that it acted as a confounder of the association we aimed to estimate. Besides, to exclude the hypothesis "region" could be a moderator, an interaction term was added to the final model, but it was not statistically significant (p = 0.269).

A significance level of 0.05 was used. A Gaussian model was used instead of Poisson's because the SMR were normally distributed and the counts of the deaths were too over-dispersed to run a Poisson or even a negative Binomial model (Kwan, 2014).

### RESULTS

**Figure 1** and **Table 2** show the distribution of the SMR for the 74 cities included in this study. Twenty-one cities registered SMR significantly lower than 100 (the EU-28 average) and 37 SMR significantly higher than 100. As observable in **Figure 1**, there was a clear Northeast-Southwest division of the SMR, with the highest SMR predominantly found in Eastern and Northern European cities—Miskolc (146.5; 95% CI 140.6– 152.6), Riga (136.3; 133.5–139.1), Sofia (133.8; 131.6–136.1), Copenhagen (132.4; 128.4–136.4), Burgas (131.1; 125.6–136.7) and Ostrava (130.2; 125.8–134.7)—and the lowest in Western and Southern European cities—Paris (73.1; 72.0–74.4), Madrid (74.0; 73.1–74.9), Rennes (75.7; 72.8–78.8), Barcelona (79.6; 78.3–80.8), and Heraklion (80.7; 75.5–86.0).

**Figure 2** and **Table 3** show the distribution of the residents' dissatisfaction scores. Large geographical differences were also found in the residents' dissatisfaction scores. Eastern and some Southern European cities (mean global dissatisfaction score 3.48 and 3.82, respectively) tended to have higher dissatisfaction scores, contrasting with Western and Northern European cities (mean global dissatisfaction score 2.25 and 2.35, respectively). The five cities with highest global dissatisfaction score were Naples (score of 4.84), Athens (4.84), Rome (4.80), Palermo (4.65), and Sofia (4.45), whereas the lowest were observed in Luxembourg (1.66), Newcastle (1.50), Munich (1.46), Aalborg (1.38), and Zurich (1.31).

Very similar patterns were observed for the domains of dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction with the economic environment (i.e., unemployment, poverty, ability to make ends meet) was highest in Lisbon (5.00), Naples (4.84), Rome (4.80), Athens (4.84) and Palermo (4.65) and lowest in Aalborg (1.00), Cardiff (1.50), Essen (1.50), Munich (1.67), and Oulu (1.67). Concerning the physical environment (i.e., green spaces, noise, pollution), higher dissatisfaction scores were observed in Rome (4.90), Bucharest (5.00), Sofia (5.00), Athens (5.00) and Naples (5.00), and the lowest in Zurich (1.00), Luxembourg (1.10), Rostock (1.20), Rennes (1.20), and Newcastle (1.29). Healthcare services were rated more poorly (5.00) in Naples, Athens, Sofia, Bucharest, Rome, Palermo, Warsaw, Burgas, Riga, Vilnius, Cluj-Napoca, Gdansk, and Pietra Neamt, whereas Zurich, Rennes, Newcastle, Munich, Bordeaux, Geneva, Oslo, Strasbourg, Graz, Lille, Antwerp, Liege, and Brussels exhibited lower dissatisfaction levels (1.00). Higher residents' dissatisfaction with infrastructures/services (i.e., transport, schools, cultural facilities) were observed in Madrid (4.36), Palermo (4.43), Rome (4.43), Naples (4.50) and Athens (4.71) and lower in Aalborg (1.50), Helsinki (1.50), Zurich (1.00), Geneva (1.00), and Newcastle (1.00). And, finally, the dissatisfaction with the social environment (i.e., trust safety, integration) was higher in Palermo (4.57), Turin (4.86), Naples (4.86), Rome (5.00), and Athens (5.00), and lesser in Zurich (1.14), Aalborg (1.43), Munich (1.43), Luxembourg (1.43), Copenhagen (1.43) and Rostock (1.43).

It is important to note that all domains of dissatisfaction were moderately-highly correlated, and particularly strong was the correlation between dissatisfaction with physical environment and social environment (r = 0.85; **Figure 3**), meaning that generally urbanites tend to be simultaneously dissatisfied with numerous aspects of the city environment.

**Table 4** shows the associations between residents' dissatisfaction scores and mortality. In Model 0, we looked for the bivariate associations between each dissatisfaction score, region and SMR and we found that only the dissatisfaction score with healthcare (β = 0.286; 95% CI 0.065, 0.507) was significantly associated with the SMR, although all other regression coefficients were positive, indicating that increased dissatisfaction with cities' attributes was associated with increased mortality. European region was also significantly associated with mortality: compared with Eastern Europe, Southern (−1.476; −2.080, −0.871) and Western European cities (−0.896; −1.408, −0.384) presented significantly lower levels of mortality.

Model 1 only included mortality and the European regions. The proportion of variance explained by this simple model was nevertheless 24.2%.

In Model 2, to take into account the inter-correlation between the five dissatisfaction scores, we entered all dissatisfaction scores in the model and kept only those significantly associated with the SMR. We observed that only the healthcare dissatisfaction score (0.286; 0.065, 0.507) was independently and significantly associated with the SMR, i.e., the higher the dissatisfaction levels of the residents with health aspects the higher the mortality. All the other dissatisfaction scores lost statistical significance, probably due to the high degree of inter-correlation between them, as depicted in **Figure 3**. The proportion of variance explained by Model 2 was very low: 6.9%, much lower than when only European regions were considered.

Adjusting for the European regions (Model 3), dissatisfaction with healthcare (0.286; 0.065, 0.507) and with social environment (0.286; 0.065, 0.507) were both found to be significantly and

positively associated with mortality. At the same time, the proportion of variance explained by the model increased to 33.7%.

### DISCUSSION

This study was one of the first addressing the health status of European cities. Grounded on a set of Europe-wide Quality of Life Surveys, we were able to explore the link between residents' dissatisfaction with the city and health. We found profound differences in mortality across 74 cities in Europe, with the highest risk of death generally found in Eastern and Northern Europe and the lowest in the South and Western European cities. Residents' dissatisfaction levels varied greatly as well, and were generally higher in Eastern Europe and in some Southern European cities. We found a significant association between city levels of mortality and residents' dissatisfaction with healthcare services and social environment.

The Southwest-Northeast division of health in Europe was a constant in this study. The East-West divide of Europe has been extensively reported elsewhere (Vågerö, 2010). Similarly, the comparatively unexpectedly poor performance in life expectancy gains in some Northern European countries has also been matter of discussion (Juel et al., 2000). This panorama supports the idea that, although cities share some characteristics, both detrimental (pollution, segregation, crowding) and beneficial (concentration

TABLE 2 | Standardized Mortality Ratios (SMR) and 95% Confidence Intervals (IC 95%) in the 74 European cities (ascending order).

#### TABLE 2 | Continued

AT, Austria; BE, Belgium; BG, Bulgaria; CH, Switzerland; CZ, Czech Republic; DE, Germany; DK, Denmark; EE, Estonia; EL, Greece; ES, Spain; FI, Finland; FR, France; HR, Croatia; HU, Hungary; IT, Italy; LI, Lithuania; LT, Latvia; LU, Luxembourg; MT, Malta; NL, Netherlands; NO, Norway; PL, Poland; PT, Portugal; RO, Romania; SI, Slovenia; SK, Slovakia; SE, Sweden; UK, United Kingdom; W, Western Europe; N, Northern Europe; S, Southern Europe; E, Eastern Europe.

of employment, equipment, goods), truth is they seem to reproduce the health status of the whole country making them a kind of a barometer of national health. The Southwest-Northeast division of Europe was also observed for the dissatisfaction levels of the residents, although in Southern European cities a rather large proportion of the residents did also rate poorly several aspects of the city functioning and resources. Real-life problems in city functioning and resources, but also cross-national cultural differences might explain these differences. For instance, when it comes to self-reported health, studies observed cross-national and cultural differences in self-assessed health; generally southern European respondents tended to perceived more poorly their health status than their Scandinavian counterparts (Jürges, 2007).

We found that after removing the effect of the European region (a latent variable that summarize the tremendous structural and cultural differences between European countries/regions), citizen's dissatisfaction levels with key aspects of the urban resources and functioning—healthcare and social environment—were associated to mortality levels of the cities. Evidence of an association between residents' satisfaction and health outcomes and well-being can be found in the literature. Hogan and colleagues, in a four-city study,

have precisely observed an association between residents' ratings about city performance/amenities and their happiness levels (Hogan et al., 2016). Shiue, in Taiwan, found that satisfaction with neighborhood environment was related with self-rated health (Shiue, 2012). And, finally, perceived neighborhood safety and social environment have been consistently associated with numerous health outcomes (Wen et al., 2006; Kim et al., 2013; Polling et al., 2014; Assari et al., 2015).

Apart from the previously mentioned studies, which addressed subjective feelings about the city's performance, the health-impact of the urban environment has been essentially evaluated through objective assessments. Interestingly, our findings corroborate those drawn from studies that used objective measures. This highlights the importance of keep conducting large surveys, as the ones employed in the present study, and of using these data as a complement of objective information. In addition, using perceived/subjective measures offers a number of advantages. Certain issues, such as aesthetics, safety, and disorder, satisfaction with the way services work and/or feelings and attitudes, are difficult to capture using objective assessments (McCrea et al., 2006). Moreover, subjective measures capture the "human perception of space" (i.e., place) improving our the understanding of the urban environment (McCrea et al., 2006; Kothencz et al., 2015). Putting in other words, the objective attributes of the city's environment, once they have been evaluated by the individual (and the personal

AT, Austria; BE, Belgium; BG, Bulgaria; CH, Switzerland; CZ, Czech Republic; DE, Germany; DK, Denmark; EE, Estonia; EL, Greece; ES, Spain; FI, Finland; FR, France; HR, Croatia; HU, Hungary; IT, Italy; LI, Lithuania; LT, Latvia; LU, Luxembourg; MT, Malta; NL, Netherlands; NO, Norway; PL, Poland; PT, Portugal; RO, Romania; SI, Slovenia; SK, Slovakia; SE, Sweden; UK, United Kingdom; W, Western Europe; N, Northern Europe; S, Southern Europe; E, Eastern Europe.

characteristics and experience they carry), become subjective, and lead to a certain degree of satisfaction (John, 1987; Amérigo and Aragonés, 1997).

Regarding the impact of social environment, our results corroborate the literature reporting that social support and social connectedness networks are very important, not only as a complement to the formal healthcare system, but also as a protection against the adversities inherent of being ill, being poor and being alone (Seeman, 1996). Indeed most of the studies that addressed whether residential satisfaction affected health outcomes, point toward the same direction. Perceived neighborhood safety and social environment have been associated with self-rated health (Wen et al., 2006; Kim et al., 2013; Assari et al., 2015), health-related quality of life (Parra et al., 2010), mental illness (Polling et al., 2014), and stroke risk (Kim et al., 2013). And, importantly, some of these studies confirmed this association remained significant after accounting for objective measures (Wen et al., 2006; Kim et al., 2014) and others found that indeed perceived measures of the social environment, rather than objective ones, show a larger association over the studied outcomes (Polling et al., 2014). It is also interesting to note that our results do also show a particularly strong correlation between social and physical environment that has also been reported elsewhere; apparently, health-supportive physical environments influence the social capital of the places, by reducing social inequalities (Mitchell and Popham, 2008), and

TABLE 4 | Association between residents' dissatisfaction scores and standardized mortality ratio in the 74 cities.

Model 0, univariable; Model 1, multivariable, not adjusted for European region; Model 2, multivariable, adjusted for European region.

In bold, statistical significant coefficients.

β, standardized regression coefficient and 95% Confidence Intervals (CI).

by enhancing social interaction and social inclusion (Maas et al., 2009).

When it comes to healthcare, although the questions from Urban Audit were comparatively fewer and somehow vague, the answers might provide an idea on how satisfied patients were with healthcare services. In our study, we found a significant association with mortality—higher mortality rates were observed in cities with higher dissatisfaction scores with healthcare—indicating that, as other suggested, the systematic evaluation of patient satisfaction might provide useful information on patients' experiences that can contribute for improving the performance of healthcare services and the quality of care provided to the patients (Browne et al., 2010).

Several studies and reports support the health benefits of high patient satisfaction; satisfied patients may have increased treatment adherence and better health outcomes (Chue, 2006; Glickman et al., 2010; Zgierska et al., 2014). Also suggesting that satisfaction with healthcare is critical for the population wellbeing, Hogen and colleagues observed that the effect of healthcare performance on well-being and happiness was significant for all groups and not only for those over 65 years, contrasting with most of the studied satisfaction domains that did only associate with happiness in specific age groups (Hogan et al., 2016).

In our study, we did not find a significant association between dissatisfaction levels with the physical environment and mortality, a topic that numerous studies have explored by looking at the impact of air pollution exposure. Multiple polled and meta-analysis studies showed air pollution is directly associated with mortality, cardiorespiratory diseases and allergies (Beelen et al., 2014). Access to greenspace and noise exposure did also seem to be associated with numerous health outcomes: overall mortality (Barceló et al., 2016; Gascon et al., 2016), mental health (Lee and Maheswaran, 2011), and behaviors, such as physical activity (Cohen et al., 2007). More recently, increasing attention has been given to the contact with nature and water within urban contexts (Hartig and Kahn, 2016). According to numerous studies conducted in different countries, the human interaction with natural environment provides opportunities for relaxation, enhances connections between urban inhabitants and the biosphere, and promotes subjective well-being and happiness (MacKerron and Mourato, 2013; Marketta et al., 2015; Hartig and Kahn, 2016; Samuelsson et al., 2018).

Yet, several other studies have found that, compared to other aspects, namely socioeconomic conditions and access to healthcare, the physical environment play a less important role (Hood et al., 2016). Moreover, some investigations have shown that the exposure to harmful physical environments may be more strongly associated with specific causes of death, namely cancer, and not so strongly with overall mortality (Ribeiro et al., 2015). Regrettably, in our study we were not able to differentiate the causes of death. Note that, as previously mentioned, physical, and social environment dissatisfaction scores were very correlated, which means that these two kinds of deprivation tend to happen simultaneously, making it difficult to separate their effects.

Although several studies suggest that availability of destinations, services and good-quality infrastructures bring numerous health benefits (Frumkin, 2002), from obesity prevention (Sarkar et al., 2017) to feelings of well-being (Marketta et al., 2015), in our study, no significant association between dissatisfaction with infrastructures/services and mortality levels was observed. Similarly, we found that perceived economic environment was not significantly related with mortality in European cities. This finding deserves further validation, as the absence of an association does not imply they are uncorrelated. The fact we did not find a significant link between urban mortality and resident's ratings about the economic circumstances might be related with the specificity of our data and of our study area. The link between health and socioeconomic individual or group characteristics is probably one of the oldest and solidest findings in public health. But, these findings have been mostly drawn on objective indicators of socioeconomic circumstances (personal income or area level income, unemployment rates, occupation, etc.), which might not necessarily reflect the people's feelings about their and cities' economic problems. Some authors argue that income inequality, the discrepancy in income between population groups, rather than income, the population average, might be particularly important for health, being associated with higher disparities and lower longevity and life expectancy (Wilkinson, 1992; Truesdale and Jencks, 2016). The commonly used indicators of economic environment evaluate the amount of disposable income and material resources per capita, which despite being undoubtedly essential, turn a blind eye to people's beliefs about the fairness of income distribution, perceptions of their own income and their ability to make ends meet. These aspects are particularly important in the definition of deprivation. Deprivation refers to unmet need, which is caused by a lack of all kinds of resources, rather than financial needs alone and it can also be categorized as objective or subjective (Townsend, 1979, 1987; Guillaume et al., 2016). Objective deprivation is perceived collectively or socially and is registered in the census; subjective deprivation is individually perceived and is assessed by questionnaire in specific surveys (Townsend, 1979, 1987; Guillaume et al., 2016). Finally, it is also important to highlight that, in general, cities are characterized for being economically dynamic places even in more disadvantaged regions/countries, which might mean that what would distinguish a city from another might be aspects unrelated with economic circumstances (Hogan et al., 2015, 2016), as the ones we identified.

Our study presents some limitations that deserve further discussion. Firstly, we have focused on a pre-selected set of large cities leaving behind medium and small urban settings, which hold a significant amount of the European population. Then, our results might not be valid for these medium and small urban settings. Secondly, we have also focused on a single indicator of population health, mortality. A study of such nature would be improved by including other measures of health status such as preventable mortality or healthy life expectancy, unfortunately not available at city-level. Additionally, we assumed a single value of mortality of each city, despite knowing that European cities tend to exhibit a rather large within city heterogeneity in health outcome (Marí-Dell'Olmo et al., 2015) that an overall measure might not capture. The ecological design constitutes another important limitation, as we cannot guarantee the observed associations occur at individual-level too. Yet, notice that a dozen cross-sectional studies, conducted at individuallevel, reported a significant relationship between satisfaction and individual health status (Wen et al., 2006; Shiue, 2012; Kim et al., 2013; Polling et al., 2014; Assari et al., 2015). Finally, the present study relied on a relatively small dataset and we could not confront our results with the ones that would be obtained by using objective measures about the urban environment, which would be ideal, since they are nonoverlapping measures complementing each other (Nyunt et al., 2015).

Study strengths should be highlighted too. Our study provides a global view of the health status of European urbanities and it is the first establishing a link between residents' ratings about several aspects of city functioning and resources and objective measures of health. Because we grounded our study on Urban Audit Database, our geographical units and indicators are directly comparable, which strengthens our study. Our findings may also be important for city planners as they showed a relationship between citizen's perceptions about certain urban attributes and mortality, suggesting that measuring citizen's satisfaction with the urban environment might aid in the construction of healthier cities.

In conclusion, we revealed large inequalities in health between European cities and we found a significant association between city levels of mortality and residents' dissatisfaction with certain urban features, suggesting subjective information can be also used to comprehend the health of the urbanities. At a city-level, dissatisfaction with the healthcare services (care provided by doctors and hospitals) and social environments (trust, networks) seemed to be detrimental factors to health across European cities. So, although much more attention has been given to traditional economic and material determinants of health, these complementary aspects should not be disregarded by the local governments.

### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

AR designed the study, performed the statistical analysis and drafted the manuscript. SF and HB supervised the research, contributed to the interpretation of results and helped to draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

### FUNDING

This study was funded by FEDER through the Operational Programme Competitiveness and Internationalization and national funding from the Foundation for Science and Technology—FCT (Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology, and Higher Education) under the Unidade de Investigação em Epidemiologia—Instituto de Saúde Pública da Universidade do Porto (EPIUnit) (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006862; Ref. UID/DTP/04750/2013); and the Postdoc grant SFRH/BPD/97015/2013 (SF), co-funded by the FCT and the POPH/FSE Program.

### REFERENCES

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2018 Ribeiro, Fraga and Barros. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Cultivating Positive Youth Development, Critical Consciousness, and Authentic Care in Urban Environmental Education

Jesse Delia1 and Marianne E. Krasny 2 \*

1 Common Ground High School, Urban Farm, and Environmental Education Center, New Haven, CT, United States, 2 Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States

This paper addresses the issue of how to provide affordances for youth development in the context of environmental stewardship in cities. Urban environmental education encompasses place-based and action-oriented stewardship practices, including community gardening and vegetable production, often with the dual goals of developing youth and community assets. Yet in-depth understanding of how these goals are achieved is lacking. Using narrative inquiry, we explored participant experiences in a multi-year agriculture internship program conducted by the food justice organization East New York Farms! (ENYF) in Brooklyn, NY. Emerging from our conversations with youth were five themes defining their intern experience: ENYF as somewhere to belong, to be pushed, to grapple with complexity, to practice leadership, and to become yourself. We propose a theory of change that emphasizes politicized notions of caring as a foundation for cultivating developmental assets, including competence, contribution, and critical consciousness, among youth who participate in ENYF programs multiple years. This paper extends the literature on socio-environmental affordances to encompass urban environmental education programs, which incorporate physical and social features that act as affordances. Further, this paper describes a feedback loop in which youth afforded opportunities to develop assets through contributing to their community in turn create affordances for additional youth and adults.

Keywords: environmental education, positive youth development, authentic care, urban environmental education, youth of color, critical consciousness

## INTRODUCTION

Urban environmental education is one means by which children realize the affordances offered by nature and social interactions in cities (Chawla, 2001, 2006). For example, urban environmental education programs serve as settings for developing youth assets (Schusler and Krasny, 2010), elements of sense of place (Kudryavtsev et al., 2012) and social capital (Krasny et al., 2013), and resilience at the individual, community, and social-ecological systems levels (Dubois and Krasny, 2016). In U.S. cities, community organizations and non-profits conduct environmental education programs after-school and during summers, often with youth of color who live in low-income neighborhoods and are hired as paid interns (Smith et al., 2015). Activities include urban agriculture, collaborating with scientists in data collection (e.g., on treatments to mitigate combined sewer overflow), park maintenance, oyster and coastal dune restoration, street tree planting and

#### Edited by:

Stephan Barthel, Gävle University College, Sweden

#### Reviewed by:

Eleanor Ratcliffe, Imperial College London, United Kingdom Simon West, Stockholm University, Sweden

> \*Correspondence: Marianne E. Krasny<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Environmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 21 July 2017 Accepted: 22 December 2017 Published: 15 January 2018

#### Citation:

Delia J and Krasny ME (2018) Cultivating Positive Youth Development, Critical Consciousness, and Authentic Care in Urban Environmental Education. Front. Psychol. 8:2340. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02340 pruning, and other forms of direct stewardship action. Urban environmental education programs also engage youth in indirect actions such as policy advocacy and teaching younger children (Russ and Krasny, 2017).

In a study of nine rural, suburban, and urban programs that engaged youth in direct and indirect environmental actions, Schusler and Krasny (2010) found that such programs can provide affordances for developing cultural and interpersonal competence, self-esteem, sense of purpose, and other youth developmental assets or qualities that help youth succeed in school and civic life (Benson et al., 2011). However, we lack indepth knowledge of how features of environmental education programs, such as physical setting and social interactions, afford opportunities for positive youth development in ways that are responsive and relevant to urban young people of color, such as through developing critical consciousness, or a moral stance linked to socio-political awareness and actions in the larger world (Mustakova-Possardt, 1998). In this paper, we explore in-depth how an urban agriculture youth intern program in Brooklyn NY, provides developmental affordances for youth of color in a low-income neighborhood. Specifically, we asked: How do interns' narratives describe the ways in which participation in an urban agriculture, environmental education program fosters development of youth assets and critical consciousness?

Through in-depth interviews with youth, elements of authentic care, or caring relationships that honor students' experiences of class, race, and culture (Valenzuela, 1999), emerged as part of the process of developing youth assets. Thus, we propose that urban environmental education, rooted in a context of authentic care demonstrated by adult leaders and peers, provides affordances for positive youth development and the development of critical consciousness. The results of this research contribute to our understanding of a widespread practice in urban environmental education, i.e., engaging youth in urban agriculture and other direct and indirect environmental action, while expanding on earlier notions of urban affordances for child development, which have focused largely on physical infrastructure (e.g., Kyttä, 2002).

## THEORY AND BACKGROUND

Research on positive youth development, authentic care, critical pedagogy of place, affordances, and environmental education informed this study and are briefly reviewed below.

### Positive Youth Development

Starting in the 1990s, interventions and research to support families and children shifted from a focus on problem behaviors of troubled teenagers to factors that are present when youth experience healthy physical, intellectual, emotional, and social development (Eccles and Gootman, 2002; Roth and Brooks-Gunn, 2003; Catalano et al., 2004; Lerner and Lerner, 2011). An outcome of this work is an asset-based approach, referred to as positive youth development, which assumes that all youth have the capacity to become successful adults given appropriate support (Eccles and Gootman, 2002; Lerner et al., 2005).

Positive youth development scholars and practitioners consider both youth assets and the types of settings that enable youth to develop those assets (Eccles and Gootman, 2002). Assets include self-efficacy, prosocial norms, and meaningful relationships with peers and adults, as well as more broadly social, emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and moral competence (Catalano et al., 2004). Another approach to positive youth development focuses on the "Five Cs," defined as "Competence, Confidence, Connection, Character, and Caring" (Lerner et al., 2005), with competence, confidence, and connections more common outcomes of youth programs than character and caring (Roth and Brooks-Gunn, 2003). Studies of youth programs as contexts for positive youth development have revealed that a sixth C, "Contributions" to community and civil society, is possible when the other five are present (Lerner et al., 2005).

Youth programs conducted by community-based organizations and national non-profits (e.g., YMCA, Boys and Girls Clubs) offer features known to promote positive youth development (Larson, 2000; Larson and Angus, 2011; Lerner and Lerner, 2011; Salusky et al., 2014), including supportive relationships, opportunities to belong, positive social norms, support for efficacy and mattering, opportunities for skill building, structure and safety, and integration across family, school, and community efforts. To support positive youth development, programs should be long-term; foster positive relationships among youth and between youth and adults; include activities that build life skills through setting expectations, posing challenges, and providing recognition; and empower youth by providing opportunities to use life skills as participants in and leaders of community activities (Eccles and Gootman, 2002; Roth and Brooks-Gunn, 2003; Lerner and Lerner, 2011).

Although influential in policy and research, the positive youth development framework has been critiqued for paying scant attention to structural inequities and barriers to development such as poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of injustice (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2011). Social justice youth development, which seeks to cultivate critical consciousness and social action (Ginwright and Cammarota, 2002), addresses these critiques and mirrors calls for environmental education that engages issues of power and justice (Bowers, 2002; Gruenewald, 2003).

### Authentic Care

Valenzuela (1999) study of Mexican-American and immigrant youths' schooling points to the importance of authentically caring relationships that honor students' experiences of class, race, and culture. Similarly, Bartolomé (2008) offers the notion of cariño, reflecting an "understanding that caring for and loving one's subordinated students is insufficient unless the love and care are informed by authentic respect and a desire to equalize unequal learning conditions in school" (p. 2). For teachers, authentic care goes beyond solely caring for individual students to encompass preparing students to confront inequitable and undemocratic social structures (Ladson-Billings, 1995). Drawing from a study of exemplary black women educators, Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2002) articulates a notion of womanist caring that links self-change to long-term work toward social change, and embraces "the maternal," political clarity, and an ethic of risk that acknowledges caring does not guarantee one can have a positive influence on youth. Discussions of care and caring in environmental education traditionally focus on teaching students to care for and about nature (Russell and Bell, 1996; Martin, 2007), although McKenzie and Blenkinsop (2006) outline a broader ethic of care in outdoor adventure education programs. Authentic care for youth by adult leaders can be considered a social affordance provided through environmental education programs.

### Critical Pedagogy of Place

Environmental education taking place in the context of racial and ethnic diversity in cities demands a critical perspective (Ceaser, 2012; Cermak, 2012; McKenzie et al., 2017) that seeks to promote ecological and social justice by addressing issues related to structural oppression and social identity (Cole, 2007). In one such program, Cermak (2012) used "green hip hop" to connect environmental concepts to students' lived experiences as a means of instilling critical ecological literacy.

Drawing on place-based education (Sobel, 2004), ecosystem science, and critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), Gruenewald (2003) proposes a "critical pedagogy of place" that integrates ecological understanding with an analysis of issues related to power and justice. The goal is to cultivate critical consciousness (conscientização, Freire, 1973) and encourage action that addresses poverty, environmental racism, food security, and equitable access to green space. Critical pedagogy of place integrates decolonization, or the undoing of the damage caused by oppression through recognizing, developing the tools, and acting to disrupt inequitable systems; and reinhabitation, or learning to live well together in a place through restoration, preservation, and transformation of both human and non-human relationships (Gruenewald, 2003; Gruenewald and Smith, 2008). Smith (2007) demonstrated how community-based projects were successful in connecting students to local people and places—supporting a process of reinhabitation—but took only small steps in instigating a process of decolonization, which he attributes to educators' fear of administrator or community backlash when addressing controversial topics.

### Affordances and Environmental Education

Previous work on affordances has focused on how children in environmental education programs can use and shape features of the physical environment, such as making a sculpture from branches or building a dam with small rocks in a stream (Chawla, 2006; Said, 2012). Being able to use and shape these physical affordances contributes to learning and action. According to Chawla (2006), when children are able to see changes in their environment as a result of their actions, they learn not only about physical properties of the world but also about their own capabilities, and thus develop competence.

In addition to physical settings, behavior settings that enable interactions among youth and adult leaders provide opportunities for learning (Chawla, 2006). Researchers have emphasized affordances for developing social skills, which may be particularly important for children and adolescents as they go through stages of development (Kyttä, 2004), and have described how children might shape affordances through participation in environmental planning (Kyttä et al., 2004; Rudd et al., 2017). Clark and Uzzell (2002) proposed the notion of integrated socio-environmental affordances, such as a young person's home, school, playground, neighborhood, or city center, which integrate physical (e.g., plants, buildings) with social features, such as people with knowledge, observable behaviors, attitudes, and cultural values. We suggest that urban environmental education programs also offer socio-environmental affordances stemming from the rich settings (e.g., community gardens, farmers' markets) and social interactions that occur within these programs. In this paper, we are particularly interested in affordances that lead to the development of youth assets, such as caring, contribution, and competence, and that incorporate critical thinking or awareness.

### Environmental Education Programs as Providers of Affordances for Positive Youth Development

Environmental education encompasses a wide range of programs that provide access to nature and adult mentors (Sauvé, 2005; Fraser et al., 2014), including those in which youth are active agents changing their environment and community. Thus, similar to youth programs more broadly, environmental education programs may provide adolescents with opportunities to develop responsibility and agency (Larson and Angus, 2011; Salusky et al., 2014) and may serve as a gateway to broader participation in civil society (Lerner et al., 2003, 2005; Lewis-Charp et al., 2003). In particular, place-based (Sobel, 2004), critical pedagogy of place (Gruenewald, 2003), participatory (Reid et al., 2008; Læssøe and Krasny, 2013), and environmental action (Jensen and Schnack, 1997; Schusler and Krasny, 2014) approaches to environmental education seem well-suited to providing affordances for positive youth development because they engage young people in reflection and in community environmental action.

Insights into positive youth development and environmental education have emerged from studies of environmental action programs in community settings (Schusler et al., 2009; Schusler and Krasny, 2010). Such programs engage youth in volunteerism, service learning, and related forms of civic participation, which provides opportunities for developing youth assets (Lerner et al., 2003; Lewis-Charp et al., 2003; Chung and Probert, 2011; Lerner and Lerner, 2011). In one study, educators leading environmental action programs spoke about "preparing youth for future roles as voters who think critically about issues and as citizens committed to serving their community whether in environmental or other arenas" and as "agents of social change within their communities" (Schusler et al., 2009, p. 117). Other studies have linked youth environmental civic engagement to school success, communication skills, feelings of self-worth, sense of social commitment and responsibility, and development of social skills and positive relationships (Riemer et al., 2014; Stephens, 2015). Leaders of environmental action programs describe multiple program elements that contribute to positive youth development including creating safe spaces, providing structure, building relationships, bridging differences, setting expectations, providing opportunities for meaningful contribution, supporting youth, connecting youth with their community, and expanding horizons through novel experiences and reflection (Schusler and Krasny, 2010). Similarly, studies of environmental clubs have documented multiple positive youth development outcomes in Africa (Johnson-Pynn and Johnson, 2010), China (Johnson et al., 2007), Guyana (Comber, 2016), and Canada (de Vreede et al., 2014).

In addition to being outcomes of environmental action programs, youth assets such as locus of control and social connectivity may predict future environmental behaviors (Hungerford and Volk, 1990) and collective environmental actions (Chawla and Cushing, 2007), suggesting feedbacks between engaging in action and developing assets. The notion of feedbacks between environmental action and positive youth development is consistent with Silbereisen and Eyferth's (1986) "development as action in context," which proposes that development is an outcome of intentional, goal-oriented action that produces changes not only in the individual but also in the program context or community. For example, youth in environmental action and club programs shape their environment to meet larger social goals—such as planting a community garden to enhance community cohesion and food access—which in turn provides a setting for youth to develop competence and self-efficacy. In short, adolescents in an environmental education program may shape an environment or an affordance so that it supports the pursuit of their goals and in so doing develop assets (Clark and Uzzell, 2002).

### METHODOLOGY AND METHODS

The results reported here are drawn from a master's degree study integrating positive youth development and critical pedagogy of place in urban environmental education (Delia, 2013).

### Program Context

We examined positive youth development within the context of the non-profit organization East New York Farms! (ENYF), whose mission is "to organize youth and adults to address food justice in our community by promoting local sustainable agriculture and community-led economic development1 ." Because ENYF is part of a community organization started in the 1960s as a grassroots, community response to racist policies and poverty (Thabit, 2003) and a need for educational and social programming (UCC, 2017) in East New York, we felt it would be an ideal site to examine positive youth development within the context of an organization that explicitly integrates resistance and critical perspectives into youth and community development.

We worked with ENYF's urban agriculture youth internship program, which employs up to 35 youth during the growing season from March until November. The interns learn hands-on agricultural skills at the ENYF farm and in nearby community gardens, run ENYF farmers' market stands, and learn about environment, health, community development, leadership, and social justice through their hands-on experiences and workshops. First-year interns participate in all aspects of growing and selling the food at markets as well as in all in-house workshops and offsite conferences. Returning interns (second-, third-, and fourthyear) take on greater responsibility including leading crews of first-year interns at the ENYF site and nearby community gardens, learning specialized knowledge (e.g., about producing and selling food), and leading workshops for first-year interns and at conferences (Delia, 2013). In this study, we focused on nine returning interns some of whom were also crew leaders for younger interns, and how they depicted the ways in which participation in an urban, farm-based environmental education program contributed to their development and critical consciousness.

### Methodology

The first author used narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) over two summers to establish a trusting relationship with ENYF staff and youth, to understand how youth and staff perceived the youths' experience at ENYF, and to offer insights that can be reshaped and applied in other settings. Narrative inquiry is suited to the study because it allows for deep understanding of participants' experiences in the context of their lives within and beyond ENYF, and addresses ethical considerations and views of the authors about what counts as knowledge and the purposes of research (e.g., that research "subjects" are authoritative experts on their own lives and lived experiences, and that this knowledge goes beyond the "anecdotal"). Reflecting "the stories of life contained in the inquiry" (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p. 41), the interns' personal narratives allowed us to explore in-depth observations and practical theories regarding positive youth development in the context of an urban agriculture intern program.

### Ethics

We followed an appreciative inquiry process, defined as "a research method focusing on positive organizational attributes that may fuel change" (Grant and Humphries, 2006, p. 402), to address ethical concerns about conducting research on a small, community-based organization and its participants. This entailed focusing our interview questions on youth assets and programmatic strengths to elicit intern stories that demonstrated what worked well at ENYF, while applying a critical lens through reflection and deliberation during (Reed, 2007) and after (Grant and Humphries, 2006) the inquiry process. Further, recognizing her positionality as a white outsider, ten years older than interviewees, the first author and researcher spent significant time participating in the program to be able to develop trusting relationships with participants. She sought to bring intern voices to the forefront and allowed interns to largely determine the tempo and direction of the interview. Finally, the first author is an experienced youth worker who brought training and expertise to engaging young people in conversations around potentially challenging topics.

1ENYF (2017). East New York Farms! Available online at: https://ucceny.org/enyf/.

This study was approved by the Cornell University Institutional Review Board and ENYF. Informed written consent was obtained from all interviewees and where appropriate, their legal guardian. In the consent form and in practice, participants could decline to participate in the study, refuse to answer a question, or request to turn off the audio recorder at any time.

#### Participants

After working alongside interns during the first year to establish trust and rapport and develop preliminary insights, the first author pursued open-ended interviews with nine returning interns (two males and seven females). The interviewees were purposely chosen as being the only returning interns in the program and thus being able to reflect on their long-term internship experience. All interviewees were secondary-schoolaged (15–18 years, mean age = 16.3, SD = 1.1) youth of color living in Brooklyn, NY. Their ethnicities and race varied, including African-American and youth of Dominican, Puerto Rican, Nigerian, Guyanese, and Jamaican heritage. Family income for interns was not available although ENYF considers financial need in the intern application process. All names used in the study are pseudonyms chosen by the participants to protect their anonymity.

#### Data Collection

In her first field season, the first author conducted informal discussions and focus groups with interns and ENYF staff to develop the interview questions. During the second season, she conducted and recorded two-part interviews (each about an hour in length) with returning interns to elicit thick description (Geertz, 1973) of participants' ENYF experiences in the context of their personal histories. The first interview, designed to understand youths' stories in context, focused on life-story and personal background, prioritizing questions related to school, family, friends, and role models, activities outside the program, and future personal and professional aspirations. The second interview focused on participants' ENYF experiences including how they found out about the program; how they became involved; stories about their interactions with other youth, staff, and community members; and reflections on what they had learned and its usefulness outside the program. All interviews were conducted one-on-one with the exception of one second interview conducted with two interns. The first author also recorded reflections and observations of the intern program in field notes.

#### Data Interpretation

The first author and two research assistants transcribed all the interviews as close to verbatim from the recordings as possible, including various speech utterances (e.g., um). The first author then read all transcripts, which informed her initial understanding of the relationship between the two a priori theoretical frameworks (positive youth development and critical pedagogy of place) and the emergent focus of care and caring. During subsequent coding, the first author focused on themes that emerged from analysis of individual narratives, which she then "checked" and explored further by looking across narratives.

Although the a priori frameworks influenced the initial reading, subsequent interpretation was based on open coding of the narratives. By utilizing both deductive and inductive strategies, both authors were able to identify codes that were informed by questions related to positive youth development and critical pedagogy of place but also be open to emergent codes that connected statements in context of a coherent understanding of the whole program (Glaser and Strauss, 1999; Maxwell, 2005). After the first open coding generated an extensive list of codes, the first author revisited the data to identify major themes and subthemes related to these codes using Atlas.ti. Through an iterative process of reading, coding, and reflecting on the transcripts, a relationship between the major themes emerged, which the authors sought to represent as a theory of change to explain how ENYF fosters positive youth development.

The first author returned to ENYF to conduct a focus group with a subset of interviewees to solicit feedback on early data interpretation. She shared transcript excerpts with participants to member check their stories and seek permission before sharing quotes. Through discussions with ENYF staff, she also developed a deeper understanding of the emergent theme of authentic care.

Throughout the data interpretation, the first author recorded memos noting general themes, patterns, novel or confusing information, and contradictions within and across narratives (Saldaña, 2013). She also used a process described as "rigorous improvisation" in the context of social justice youth development research (Ginwright and Cammarota, 2007), which involved observing young people at ENYF, immersing herself in dialogue with academic colleagues about what was happening in the program, returning to ENYF to delve deeper into understanding youths' experiences, and revising her interpretation based on overlapping and divergent information within interviews, literature, conversation, observations, and ethnographic notes.

### RESULTS

. . . you not dragging me down now 'cause I got somewhere to go, I got somewhere to be, so when you gonna stay in this house, while I go work at the garden, at the farm, you know, making my money while you just sit here. (Nova, fourth-year intern).

Starting with Nova's statement in which she passionately explains how ENYF gives her "somewhere to go. . . somewhere to be," we explore how ENYF is not just a job or educational program for the interns, but somewhere to belong, to be pushed, to grapple with complexity, to practice leadership, and to become yourself. Within each of these themes that emerged from our analysis, we identified subthemes, which we mapped to constructs related to developmental assets and settings from the positive youth development literature and to critical consciousness from critical pedagogy of place scholarship (Delia, 2013). Below we cover all five themes but focus on belonging and being pushed as relates to authentic care, and grappling with complexity as relates to critical consciousness. We have edited the intern quotes illustrating these themes slightly to remove words such as "like" and repeated phrases, while trying to maintain youth voice accurately. A full narrative account of the interns' stories can be found in Delia (2013).

### Somewhere to Belong

. . . so we see that person—all right, they havin' a bad day.  It's just like a family. East New York Family Farm—like a family. . . . I'm wanted here 'cause I don't wanna be no place that I'm not wanted. (Cedrick, second-year intern, crew leader).

Youth shared stories of their initial days as first-year interns and how they remembered feeling welcomed and appreciated by staff and returning interns. Over time, interns began to feeling safe and able to open up to adults and their ENYF peers, and felt cared for and connected.

#### Feeling Welcomed

Tamara recounts her early days at ENYF and the ways in which other youth persisted in their attempts to welcome and get to know her when she was reluctant to open up.

My first year, the first time I started working here I was quiet, like I didn't want to talk to nobody. I didn't really know anybody and I was working in the garden and then I had to work with Kimberlé, Jayden, and Aisha. . . Jayden kept trying to get conversations out of me. And I was answering him with one [word] answers. . . . and then Kimberlé tried talking to me and then she was like, you know, forget it. And then, everybody, but they still trying to talk to me and then finally I loosened up and I started talking. (Tamara, third-year intern, crew leader).

Kiah explains how staff members made her and the other interns feel respected and appreciated when they first started the youth program.

. . . when I first came to the program, [staff member] made me feel welcome. . . even when I wasn't really open—I wasn't really open to like a lot of youth here, she always made me feel comfortable, you know, like I was appreciated or something. (Kiah, secondyear intern).

#### Feeling Safe

Kimberlé recounts a story in which she shared personal information with a staff member, explaining how the staff person would never "throw her under the bus" or break her confidence. She also makes a connection to a feeling of safety and familiarity by describing ENYF as a kind of second home.

. . . one person I always go to. . . just to talk and get a lot of stuff outta my mind is [staff member].  It's very comforting, you know, you feel like it's a second home. (Kimberlé, fourth-year intern).

#### Feeling Cared for and Connected

Returning interns described the ways in which their bonds with other interns and staff knit them into a family complete with inside jokes and stories, nicknames, favorite "siblings," and an experience of intimately knowing and being known. Tamara described the ways in which "people in this job notice stuff about you," giving the example how she earned her nickname "Miss Buttercrunch T" for her love of buttercrunch cookies. She also articulates how other interns and staff observe and adopt each other's unique forms of expression, similar to how family members share mannerisms, speech patterns, and gestures.  Saturday I was working, I was painting and Priscilla was doing market, she was doing the stand and she laugh and they said, "oh gosh, you can hear Kimberlé all the way in the garden." And I was like, that wasn't Kimberlé! That was Priscilla. (Tamara, third-year intern, crew leader).

Cedrick explains how paying attention and getting to know the other interns actually allows them to "bring each other up," make each other feel better, and look out for each other at work, pointing to the ways in which supporting peers is a learned skill. Here he talks about Sadie, his fellow returning intern and co-crew leader.

Sadie [is the] person [that brings me up] 'cause there's supervisors but me and Sadie knew each other from last year. . . . me and Sadie got a connection that nobody expect 'cause the returning interns all got connections that people might not understand. You might look at each other, start laughing. They be like, "what is wrong with y'all two?" You be like, nothin'. It's just something that we remembered. So. . . we all got the connection that always bring each other up. Like everybody knows when I'm mad 'cause I'm quiet. Everybody knows when Tamara's mad 'cause she gets that face. Everybody knows when Schuyler's mad 'cause Schuyler goes in the hallway. So it's like we all know each other already. . . (Cedrick, second-year intern, crew leader).

Returning interns' stories made clear the importance of close, caring relationships with staff and other youth. In this sense the staff's work with the youth and in turn the returning interns' work with first-year interns became an affordance that enabled the youth to develop caring relationships.

 So that's really good about this job. (Kimberlé, fourth-year intern).

Returning interns share stories about how staff demonstrate high expectations by challenging them to perform new roles, revealing how they negotiate the tension between the discomfort of being asked to do too much and the benefit from performing outside their comfort zones. They also explain how the clear structure of the program pushes them to honor the guidelines and agreements they make at the beginning, pointing to both the frustration and appreciation created by rules and the consequences of not following them. Interns struggle early on but later thrive within this program structure, which initially holds them accountable for their behavior and over time facilitates them taking ownership for their actions.

#### High Expectations

Kimberlé tells a story about how the staff pretended not to know the routine in order to press interns to take leadership at the farmers' market: "during the markets, [the staff] would catch amnesia and they wouldn't remember, we would have to clean up the market without going to them." She goes on to explain how the staff's high standards pushed her and others to grow or to "crack you out your shell."

. . . other jobs, they don't really do what, you know, this job does.  (Kimberlé, fourth-year intern).

Sometimes the high expectations of staff can be overwhelming, as Tamara articulates.

Maybe sometimes it can be a little bit too hard on us . . . I think sometimes they expect us to . . . know everything. . . . Sometimes we feel like we're stuck in between a rock and a hard place and we don't know what to do because, you go to them, and ask for help. . . and they're like, well, you should know that and it's like you go and you do it. (Tamara, third-year intern, crew leader).

Tamara explains how staff pushed her and others to stretch out of their comfort zone and into new roles leading younger interns:

(w)hen I had to first lead the harvest by myself. . . some of the kids would ask me, "How do you do this?" and I was like, I don't know. . . . when I first did my first harvest I think I had Sadie with me and I was asking Sadie and she was like, "I don't know." We both . . . was like, okay, go over there and ask [staff member]. . . . sometimes she would give them an answer and sometimes she would send us back to them and we were like, dang. She sent them back.

Kiah appreciated the challenging expectations: "I appreciate every task that I get because I see them helping me. . .for the real world."

#### Clear Structure

ENYF staff make the program structure transparent to interns from the start of the season. Interns sign contracts agreeing to specific guidelines with consequences for "violations" including reduced wages. They also agree to participate in a system of straight talk with staff and peers that includes receiving positive affirmations and constructive criticism on their work performance. The clarity and enforcement of the expectations and ongoing feedback provide opportunities for youth to improve their work and leadership skills. Youth interns struggle initially but many thrive within a system that holds them accountable for their behavior. Several even offered feedback to the first author that she should more strongly enforce the guidelines to help meetings go more smoothly.

Kimberlé explains the intent and consequences of violations and how the system supports the youth. Even during a challenging time where she sometimes just felt "down," she kept a mature perspective about the purpose of violations as helping interns identify areas for improvement.

(v)iolations are not really, to like, throw you under the bus or throw you down. But it's really to . . . be like, "Hey, you know. You did this, can you improve on it." . . . unless it's to the certain extent where you're cursing and fighting, you know then. . . you need to change your act, that's when the strictness comes. . . . there'll be some days last year I used to get unmotivated, . . . where I just was like "You know, I'm just down," you know?  (Kimberlé, fourth-year intern).

Cedrick describes how the system for violations becomes more rigorous for returning interns who can no longer "earn back" or reverse the impact of a violation in the way allowed for first-year interns.

I miss those days, like first-year, you can't do no wrong. It was like, you got earn-backs so you get a violation, take five dollars out of your paycheck . . . Next paycheck, you got five dollars back on your paycheck. It's like, whoa, ok, earn-backs. This year, no earnbacks. You like, "Oh. What happened?" So it's different. I still love it. (Cedrick, second-year intern, crew leader).

The program structure is daunting at first but like most returning interns, Cedrick rises to the occasion and plans his daily routines such that he is motivated, on time, and prepared each day for work.

#### Somewhere to Grapple with Complexity

I like seeing direct change and immediate change but that's not always the way things happen, sometimes it's a long change. Yeah, like we was trying to talk to people and stuff like that but some people didn't wanna learn about something that was new. . . they were so much brainwashed throughout their life, that they just don't accept no more information. They're like, "Aw, someone already told me information. My mother told me that this was the correct way and how are you a stranger telling me that that's the wrong way?" So, yeah telling people, you don't have to always stay with something. You could always learn new things and if you think it's correct, you could go with it. (Sadie, second-year intern, crew leader).

Returning interns spend much of the growing season grappling with complex tasks including leading crews of first-year interns, giving and receiving straight talk, managing farm and farmers' market responsibilities, serving food at a soup kitchen, and speaking publicly at workshops, conferences, and occasionally public hearings. They also grapple with complex concepts related to the environment, ecological systems, and questions of food justice and the food system at workshops and conferences. While returning interns may not report every detail accurately, they do attempt to articulate what is important about the concepts they are learning and the work they do. Most notably, returning interns express pride at learning through challenges and demonstrate an emerging critical consciousness through their questioning of what they are learning.

#### Complex Tasks

Returning interns take on new roles (e.g., crew leader, Urban Agriculture Intern) that involve managing and completing complex tasks. As a crew leader, Tamara explained the myriad day-to-day responsibilities of picking a game and opening ice breaker question for her crew, keeping track of time, getting outside, and remembering to put away all the tools. Crew leaders also manage weekly harvests with the first-year crews.

Kiah is responsible for managing the share table, which involves collecting and tracking multiple gardeners' produce for sale. At the farmers' market, all sales and amounts must be recorded based on whose produce is sold, a complicated job that can be compounded by latecomers dropping off their produce on market day.  Make sure you put labels for their names, so that way they don't get confused. Then it's like, all right, boom! (claps) You done. Whoo!   (Kiah, second-year intern).

In addition to their daily responsibilities, returning interns give "straight talk" to other interns and staff at the end of the season. Although returning interns are accustomed to receiving feedback through straight talk, giving comments presents the challenge of communicating constructive criticism to peers and supervisors, which feels complicated because youth worry about making others feel badly. As Kimberlé commented, "it's very difficult to give comments when you're really close to someone."

#### Complex Concepts

In addition to job responsibilities, participating in and teaching workshops challenges interns to grapple with complex environmental, food systems, and social and food justice concepts. Returning interns work to articulate the multifaceted nature of these issues; while at times their explanations are incomplete, they demonstrate critical questioning as well as an emergent critical social-ecological consciousness.

Sadie describes a workshop in which she has to practice talking to others about the importance of behaviors such as composting. In addition to beginning to understand ecological processes, she is thinking about why teaching others about environmental behaviors is important.

Like how to talk to someone like, when you cross the street, get your point across and they would know what you was talkin' about. So that helped me, you could start off the conversation like, "Oh, do you know that mostly all of our leaves go to the landfill in New York, New Jersey and all of that could be composted and put into nutritious dirt, for the soil and it's going right back into the earth. It's like a cycle process."  I was like, "See, that could have been right here, you could even put it like in a jar or something and bring it to us," and they be like, "Okay, so next time I'll rake my leaves and bring it." I was like, "Yes, that's a good idea.. . . That grass could go in compost too. You don't have to mow it on the streets and then it goes into ocean and then it just sits, stays there just like seaweed." (Sadie, second-year intern, crew leader).

Sadie's discussion of vegetable production demonstrates how she is grappling with understanding and articulating food system issues and opportunities.

. . . a cucumber from California and a cucumber from East New York . . . the one from California was waxed and the one here wasn't, it was just shiny naturally and theirs was extremely big which you know they were inputted with steroids and stuff like that. Ours was a good size but it wasn't like there was some fertilizer that wasn't organic. And we learned the farmer gets one cent per tomato and we pay 50 cents a pound for a tomato and how does the farmer get one cent? . . . so it taught me you should really think about who to buy from, a lot 'cause the gardeners, you're paying exactly what they're selling. They're givin' it to you and you're givin' the money back to them so it's like healthily grown instead of all the way from half around the world and all the pollution that has to come over here, and all the workers that it's payin' minimum wage or even lower or the immigrants that was forced, "if you don't do this, I'm gonna take you to the immigration center." (Sadie, second-year intern, crew leader).

Similarly, Schuyler works to articulate her understanding of the way food system issues including eating healthy will take "years and years and years to fix because it took years and years to build." She reflects on the ways in which her job at ENYF has helped her learn about "the things that we deal with every day that you can actually be blindsided by" and the impact of an unjust food system on people in her community. When asked to give an example of what she meant by being "blindsided," Schuyler told a story about a workshop in which she learned how much sugar is in an Arizona iced tea.

The workshop with . . . the Arizona. I used to always buy Arizona's, and I'm like, I'm looking at the Arizona when they show me how much sugar is in Arizona.  There is no reason why there should be that, the whole bottle should contain so much sugar. And the fact that they're actually tricking people in the bottle, saying, oh it's such and such grams for 8 fluid ounce bottle but the bottle itself is 20-something ounces, 20-something fluid ounces.  (Schuyler, third-year intern).

She then shares her struggles with how to personally address health and food issues.

Ever since I was younger, I used to always be a person to love food but I'm trying too hard to start eating more healthier, I guess you could say. But then again, if I get hungry, and I don't feel like cooking or something, I'll be the first one to run to the corner store and get a bag of chips or something like that. And it's something I'm accustomed to, and, to be accustomed to something, it's really hard to get away from it. So, . . . the knowledge that I have now is helping me a lot to be able to understand what's going around. . . what is actually happening in the community. But, like, habits and being accustomed to different things is making it harder for me to actually adapt to the knowledge that I just learned about the community. So, even though–all the knowledge I have about this stuff, I don't even know if I'll be able to use it. (Schuyler, third-year intern).

Schuyler's descriptions are rich, complicated, and personal. She sees that change will take a long time and that adapting to new knowledge can be difficult. Whereas she might not offer an answer to solving food system problems, she is asking critical, systems-level questions as she works to make changes in her personal life.

#### Somewhere to Practice Leadership

I feel like this program really shook the shy outta me. (Kimberlé, fourth-year intern).

Returning interns reported the ways in which they learned about responsibility and accountability by growing into new positions and leadership roles within the program, and how they became the experts at ENYF and beyond by leading workshops and volunteers and by teaching others outside of the program. Finally, they shared their reflections on leadership and their developing praxis, while stressing the importance of youth as leaders in the food justice movement.

#### Responsibility and Accountability

Returning interns talk about having responsibility for teaching new interns because older interns previously taught them, and about learning how to be responsible for their own actions and those of their crew. For example, Schuyler talks about learning to take responsibility for miscommunication between staff and interns.

. . . if I work on a project, before, I'd probably be "Oh, she made that mistake". . . But now I'd probably be like, Oh, it was a team effort that we both take responsibility for the mistakes that we made. And I will be able to be more accountable for others because, I guess I can say I struggled with that before. Like if I messed, if I was working with a team and I messed up, I'd be the first one to point, "I did not do that! That was her!" So I guess now I'll able to account, to have accountability for others. (Schuyler, third-year intern).

#### Becoming Experts and Teaching Others

Returning interns teach and become a role model for younger interns, and share their new knowledge with ENYF adult volunteers, thus becoming a "parent of the garden." They also share their knowledge with parents and peers at workshops outside of the program. Gloria explains how she is struggling to overcome nervousness about offering her ideas.

I think one of my weaknesses is keeping things to myself, like keeping things bottled up inside. . . . maybe when I have an idea, I'm not like the first one to say "Oh, I have an idea!, like, here's a faster way to do this"–and I think trying to be a good leader, I haven't yet mastered that yet. This program is definitely helping me but, like it's so hard! (laughs) 'cause, you know sometimes you're skeptical about what people will say like, "Would this really work out?" or "What is she thinking?" . . . Maybe that's one of my weaknesses but, I should just not care about what people think, and just say it, or, voice my opinions sometimes. (Gloria, third-year intern).

#### Developing Praxis

Through their experiences, returning interns recognize leadership as a process rather than a discrete accomplishment. Cedrick reflects on how he works with younger interns.

I don't want [a new intern] to feel like, "Oh, that person's bothering me. I'm not coming to work." Messing up an opportunity, because somebody's bothering 'em. That's what I always tell the first-years. "If you feel somebody's playing too much, come to me. If I'm not in your group, go to your crew leader." (Cedrick, second-year intern, crew leader).

Additional elements of Cedrick's developing practice include "crackin' jokes" with his crew to break down "walls" or communication barriers within the ENYF "family." Other returning interns talk about the importance of "straight talk" or feedback in helping them to hone their leadership skills.

#### Youth as Leaders

Returning interns reflect on how by doing community food work and by being leaders in their community, they are defying stereotypes of what teenagers are "supposed" to be. They also express awe and inspiration at attending conferences in which youth take active leadership roles. Amazed by youth coming from all over to a conference in Philadelphia, Cedrick sees that he is part of a food justice movement larger than himself or ENYF, and how he might benefit from the connections he's making.

It was like. . . now I know I'm not the only person doing it. I know different people, around New York City, in the United States is doing it, so I'm like, okay. People from Cali, Chicago, Louisiana, North Carolina, Kentucky, Texas, Boston, it was a lot of different people. . . you made a lot of friends, you might see in the future, that might help you, in different ways. Be like, Oh, remember me? Can you do me a favor? So it's a lot of people, it's good, knowing a lot of people.

. . . at the conference. Youth bill of rights. . .food justice, we want all food to be organic, we want at least five pounds in each store of fresh fruits and vegetables from the community, so it was all about food justice. It was just saying what we demand, as youth and everything, to make sure that our generation, and the next generation doesn't suffer from the generation that's in front of us. So it's like we just want a healthy and better lifestyle than other people. (Cedrick, second-year intern, crew leader).

### Somewhere to Become Yourself

Well, I feel like you learn to gain. . . confidence in yourself. Not to always be shy because that's how I was when I first got in here. Like I was just so shy and quiet. . . But yeah, this program really helps you to shaping yourself up. Learn a lot of stuff, gain a lot of knowledge about the garden and the fruits and vegetables and, during the protest [in support of community gardens], even though I was nervous, I just shook it off, and you know, I'm doing it for a right cause. So yeah, it was really exciting. And you just really learn how to just, you know, be yourself. (Kimberlé, fourth-year intern).

Returning interns tell stories that reflect the development of a new sense of self, or "re-storying" who they are. Although this can be expected as youth become young adults, returning interns also point to a triumph over the past and their possible future. Out of this triumph comes the choice to pursue a particular decision or even major life course; most striking in these decisions is that returning interns now have the knowledge and ability to define and pursue success on their own terms. These three subthemes are integrated in the quotes below, starting with Kimberlé explaining overcoming odds to succeed in the intern program and in school.

. . . another success is being here for my third year, looking back to like my first year, it's really successful . . . getting accepted to a college . . . my one main big thing was getting my [high school] diploma, . . . , I was so happy when I went back to school on Tuesday, and she handed my diploma and I put it in my case. . . I'm so amazed that I really made it. 'Cause you know, my sister, she didn't make it, my other brother didn't make it, . . . so I'm the first one who has a diploma in the family. (Kimberlé, fourth-year intern).

Tamara explains how working with diverse youth and the ENYF guidelines around confidentiality help her to learn to trust and confide in others, which is important given her previous experiences.

I never used to trust people and I always like to be by myself, wanted to do everything on my own, I didn't want no help, nothing. And then coming here and having to work with another person and they havin' to help me like, shovel something or doing somethin' that had to be worked in a pair and then having to trust that the person's gonna do it and I think—giving trust is easier for me . . . now and. . . it helped me out because if I needed somebody to talk to I know I can always run to one of my other co-workers or one of the supervisors and talk to them and let them know something and know that I won't have to hear it back another minute. (Tamara, third-year intern, crew leader).

Finally, Sadie reflects on how adults in the community are taking note of the changes interns have made in "re-storying" themselves.

. . . we're all changing like the way people see teenagers. Instead of being rude, we're trying to help the community and being respectful. It's like adults and all. So I was like, this is good so that people don't always stereotype us. . . (Sadie, second-year intern, crew leader).

### DISCUSSION

Our results suggest that in addition to nature and neighborhoods, an environmental education program that engages youth in environmental action can provide socio-environmental affordances for positive youth development. Whereas ENYF's urban farm, community gardens, and farmers' market constitute physical settings that provide affordances (e.g., through youth growing produce, managing produce sales), the interns' stories place greater emphasis on the social affordances contributed by adult leaders and other interns. In particular, the interns spoke about how adults create a sense of belonging, yet constantly challenge them to perform complex tasks at the farmers' market and to grapple with complex concepts during workshops. This fosters interns' developmental assets including caring for and connection to other youth, adult leaders, and the broader community; and competence in performing tasks and in beginning to develop critical consciousness. Whereas connection and competence are commonly seen as outcomes of youth programs, previous work has shown that caring (Roth and Brooks-Gunn, 2003) and critical consciousness (Smith, 2007) are more difficult to cultivate.

Developing these assets occurs through youth contributing to the intern program (training younger interns) and to the broader community (community gardening, farmers' market, workshops); in this way, intern interaction with the ENYF program affordances creates new affordances for interns and the community. Further, in addressing and developing a critical awareness of food system justice, youth become agents of change. Through their contributions, ENYF youth develop critical consciousness and the program reflects a social justice youth development approach (Ginwright and Cammarota, 2002, 2007; Ginwright and James, 2002).

Below we first articulate a theory of change that emerged through our work at ENYF, and then discuss connection and caring as relates to authentic care, competence as relates to critical consciousness, and contribution as relates to creating new socio-environmental affordances for youth and community development in cities. Because other urban youth intern programs may be seen more as summer jobs and provide fewer opportunities for youth development (DuBois et al., 2017), the program model and discussion are specific to ENYF yet provide insights into what is possible through thoughtfully designed programs.

#### Program Model

ENYF interns' testimony illustrates how a participatory, praxis, place-based, and critical form of environmental education, known as environmental action (Schusler et al., 2009), provides socio-environmental affordances for youth development in an urban community. The process (**Figure 1**) begins when educators create somewhere to belong as characterized by interns' stories of feeling welcomed, cared for, and safe. But it is clear from the expectations educators set at the onset that ENYF is also somewhere to be pushed and youth soon come to realize that the program entails taking on difficult challenges. Creating such a sense of belonging while presenting challenges are features of positive youth development settings (Eccles and Gootman, 2002) and of authentic care (Valenzuela, 1999).

Returning interns also find that the program becomes somewhere to grapple with complexity, building on their first-year experience and being asked to perform ever more challenging tasks. They are also challenged to think through contested social and environmental justice issues, and thus begin to form a critical ecological literacy (Cermak, 2012). In addition, returning interns delegate responsibility during harvest time and model and reinforce community norms while facilitating workshops; in this way the program becomes somewhere to practice leadership. The challenges staff present to the interns (e.g., "amnesia" about tasks they feel the interns can tackle on their own) are consistent with findings demonstrating how leaders of youth environmental action programs continually struggle with how to balance offering youth guidance while letting youth take the lead (Schusler et al., 2017). Further, similar to youth in other environmental and social justice programs (Fusco, 2001; Calabrese Barton, 2003), returning interns demonstrate leadership situated in and for community at ENYF and in the broader community, as they teach peers and community members what they learned. Finally, as youth come to see ENYF as somewhere to become yourself, they draw on their skills, experiences, critical reflections, and relationships to create a story of their future, defining success on their own terms. In short, the affordances provided by ENYF come in the form of interns practicing community environmental stewardship, while building relationships with and learning and teaching alongside their peers, ENYF staff, and community members about how to live well in this shared place.

#### Authentic Care

The literature on authentic care (Valenzuela, 1999), womanist caring (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002), and other "politicized" understandings of care (Bartolomé, 2008) provides a context for understanding a major finding that emerged from this study, i.e., the presence of a kind of familial intimacy involving the affectionate scrutiny of habits, characteristics, and mannerism, or as one youth expressed, "people notic[ing] things about you at this job." Although McKenzie and Blenkinsop (2006) have addressed issues of care in an outdoor adventure program, we are not aware of other empirical studies addressing this program element in urban environmental education. Authentic care offers a critical sociocultural perspective for understanding the intimacy developed among ENYF interns and staff, and how returning interns are initiated into and then help create this

culture of care and caring at ENYF and in the community by leading first-year interns at the farm and market, and by their desire to effect change in the neighborhood related to food choices and access.

The ENYF culture of authentic care reflects Gruenewald's (2003) notions of how, when educators and learners recognize what needs to be transformed and what needs to be conserved, youth can re-story themselves and in so doing reinvent local social-ecological places. ENYF staff's caring also reflects political awareness as young people are cared for inside of individual relationships with attentiveness to the political landscape in which the child is living and to opportunities to enact social change (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002). Intern stories reflect trends in Brooklyn and other urban centers with high rates of disconnected youth (MOA, 2012), where ENYF provides one counterpoint to non-caring spaces that youth often encounter. For participants, this opens the possibility of moving beyond "inactive caring" (McKenzie, 2006), in which students care about the environment (or their community) but feel unable to make positive change. The care modeled by staff is later assumed by returning interns who practice leadership at ENYF by caring for first-year interns, creating a feedback between the theme of practicing leadership and the belonging and being pushed themes that comprise authentic care.

### Critical Consciousness

Drawing from Gruenewald's (2003) critical pedagogy of place, Smith (2007) describes how reinhabitation, or collective restoration and related stewardship activities, is more readily achieved in place-based education than decolonization, which involves developing a critical consciousness and addressing systemic injustice. At ENYF, reinhabitation entailed complex tasks, such as organizing and tracking multiple growers' produce at a farmers' market. Decolonization entailed struggling with larger issues related to organic wastes, food systems, and nutrition and food access in their community. The interns' narratives demonstrate they were able to accomplish the complex tasks, and that they were beginning to develop a critical consciousness as they struggled with more nuanced scientific and policy concepts. That the interns were beginning to think critically about larger issues may be due to the program's focus on food justice, which provides opportunities for interns to participate in and later lead workshops related to food deserts and similar issues. ENYF interns also participate in community organizing efforts and attend youth-centered conferences. In short, ENYF intern narratives describe how an urban environmental education program that challenges youth within a safe setting can provide affordances for youth to develop competence while demonstrating critical thinking and consciousness. This critical consciousness allows learners to perceive, understand, and potentially counter oppressive systems and structures (Freire, 1973).

### Affordances

In addition to using socio-environmental affordances such as adult mentors and urban gardening to develop their own assets, returning interns shape their larger program and community through mentoring new interns, educating adults, and providing access to fresh food for neighbors. In so doing, they extend notions of "shaping affordances" beyond manipulating nature (e.g., turning a stick into a play object, Said, 2012), and designing or planning infrastructure (Kyttä, 2002; Kyttä et al., 2004; Rudd et al., 2017), to encompass creating a public good by changing the physical and social landscape of their neighborhood. Playing an active role in civil society is in itself an affordance that leads to positive youth development outcomes, including a new sense of self and contribution to one's community (Lewis-Charp et al., 2003; Lerner et al., 2005), while engaging youth in addressing structural issues integral to social justice youth development (Ginwright and James, 2002; Sukarieh and Tannock, 2011).

# CONCLUSION

Although interns reported positive relationships with adults and peers outside of their ENYF activities, the program stood out as providing socio-environmental affordances that integrate access to natural areas like gardens and opportunities for revitalizing communities and reinventing one's story. Thus, ENYF provides affordances for positive youth development through a transactional approach, where an affordance is understood as a non-deterministic in-situ precondition for human activity, enabled by interactions of individual abilities with material and social features of the surrounding environment (Barthel and Kyttä, 2016). Youth at ENYF successfully address the challenges of growing produce and managing a farmers' market and demonstrate critical thinking and an emerging critical consciousness through posing questions about food security in an under-resourced, urban community of color. ENYF returning interns in turn become part of the social affordances for the development of assets among new interns, and through their composting, food production, and farmers' market activities, create affordances for the larger community. We attribute these results to the ENYF program design and leaders who create long-term repeat experiences, safe spaces, and appropriate challenges for youth. Although these outcomes are not universal across all urban environmental action intern programs, they do suggest that through attention to positive youth development, affordances, authentic care, and critical pedagogy of place, program leaders can foster youth assets that also contribute to socio-environmental affordances for additional youth and the broader community.

## ETHICS STATEMENT

This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Cornell University and by East New York Farms. Informed consent using a Cornell IRB written form was obtained from all individual participants included in the study and from their parents for participants younger than 18 years.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

JD conducted the field work, analyzed data, and wrote a Master's thesis based on this work. MK was JD's Master's committee chair and took the lead in revising the thesis for publication.

### FUNDING

This work was partially supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture Multi-state project NE-1049.

#### REFERENCES

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We offer deep gratitude to the young people, staff, and community members of East New York Farms! for sharing their time, insight, and wisdom so graciously. We thank our two reviewers for their insights.

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2018 Delia and Krasny. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Using Behavioural Insights to Promote Food Waste Recycling in Urban Households—Evidence From a Longitudinal Field Experiment

Noah Linder 1 \*, Therese Lindahl 2,3 and Sara Borgström4

1 Environmental Psychology, Department of Building, Energy, and Environmental Engineering, University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden, 2 The Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden, 3 Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden, 4 Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

Promoting pro-environmental behaviour amongst urban dwellers is one of today's greatest sustainability challenges. The aim of this study is to test whether an information intervention, designed based on theories from environmental psychology and behavioural economics, can be effective in promoting recycling of food waste in an urban area. To this end we developed and evaluated an information leaflet, mainly guided by insights from nudging and community-based social marketing. The effect of the intervention was estimated through a natural field experiment in Hökarängen, a suburb of Stockholm city, Sweden, and was evaluated using a difference-in-difference analysis. The results indicate a statistically significant increase in food waste recycled compared to a control group in the research area. The data analysed was on the weight of food waste collected from sorting stations in the research area, and the collection period stretched for almost 2 years, allowing us to study the short- and long term effects of the intervention. Although the immediate positive effect of the leaflet seems to have attenuated over time, results show that there was a significant difference between the control and the treatment group, even 8 months after the leaflet was distributed. Insights from this study can be used to guide development of similar pro-environmental behaviour interventions for other urban areas in Sweden and abroad, improving chances of reaching environmental policy goals.

Keywords: pro-environmental behaviour, nudging, community-based social marketing, food waste recycling, natural field experiment, longitudinal, difference-in-difference analysis

### INTRODUCTION

Most sustainability problems we face today (e.g., global warming, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water and air pollutions, and overfishing) are rooted in human behaviour (Vlek and Steg, 2007). Behaviour among urban dwellers stand for a disproportionally large share of global resource use (Grimm et al., 2008), which is predicted to increase even further, as the number of urban citizens is predicted to grow from 3.2 billion (2005), to ∼6.4 billion by 2050 (UN, 2014, 2015; UN-Habitat, 2016). Thus, to avoid potentially catastrophic global environmental change, promoting pro-environmental behaviour amongst urban inhabitants needs to be a top priority, both for policy and for research (Brewer and Stern, 2005; Vlek and Steg, 2007; Clayton et al., 2016).

#### Edited by:

Marketta Kyttä, Aalto University, Finland

#### Reviewed by:

Niamh Murtagh, University College London, United Kingdom Roope Oskari Kaaronen, University of Helsinki, Finland

> \*Correspondence: Noah Linder<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Environmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology