Andi Binet

Andi Binet is an Assistant Professor of Community-Engaged Research in the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC. Through community-based, participatory research processes, they collaborate with community members to ask, answer and act on research questions that matter to them. Andi is especially interested in understanding how urban environments shape our health and the relationships of care that sustain us, and how social and community planning can be tools for responding to the contemporary crisis of care and achieving health equity. 

Since 2015, Andi has been a proud co-lead of the Healthy Neighborhoods Study, a longitudinal Participatory Action Research project exploring the relationship between gentrification and community health in nine Boston-area neighborhoods.
Learn more about the Healthy Neighborhoods Study

Andi earned their PhD from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. Their dissertation, “Making the City Livable: Caregiving and Health in Gentrifying Boston,” won the 2022 ACSP Barclay Gibbs Jones Award for Best Dissertation in Planning. Following their PhD, Andi was a Postdoctoral Fellow at DUSP from 2021-2023, working on the Healthy Neighborhoods Study and co-teaching Participatory Action Research.

Andi Binet is committed to expanding the practice of community-engaged research within the planning field, and building pathways for community knowledge to be more powerful in shaping planning priorities, processes and interventions.

Andi is a proud member of the Healthy Neighborhoods Study team, where they have enjoyed collaborating with community and academic colleagues to develop research questions, design data-gathering instruments, conduct fieldwork, analyze data, and act on findings in order to build community health in the face of rapid urban development and gentrification. Alongside scholarly research, their team has developed community-facing resources like toolkits and videos to share our findings and methods.
Learn more about the Healthy Neighborhoods Study

At UBC and in Vancouver, they look forward to conducting action-oriented research that promotes diverse ways of knowing and equitably redistributes power in the process of producing the knowledge used to make planning decisions.

Substantively, Andi's research interests concern the relationship between planning and health equity, with a feminist focus on care and social reproduction. Planning is central to alleviating the crisis of care, which in turn is necessary to achieve health equity in cities. To date, Andi's research has explored how caregiving depends on an “urban infrastructure of care” that organizes resources and relationships necessary for meeting dependents’ needs, and how changes in the urban infrastructure of care can shape the tolls of caregiving and the health of caregivers. Moving forward, they are excited to develop strategies for comprehensive care systems planning, as well as explore how planning for care can contribute to urban health equity by addressing underlying social and economic inequities and advancing transformative planning goals.