A GIS-based urban simulation model for environmental health analysis

This paper introduces an urban simulation model for environmental health analysis (SIENA). SIENA is a novel tool to explore urban interactions and processes with regard to exposure assessments. It is based on urban structures and relationships observed in real-world cities making it a realistic representation of a functioning city. The development of SIENA involved identifying and quantifying fundamental processes and similarities in urban areas in Great Britain and using those to guide the building of SIENA within a GIS. An internal validation confirmed SIENA’s realism. Its generality, achieved through the pooling of information from different real-world cities, makes it particularly useful for developing and testing spatial epidemiological concepts and models; simulating processes and interactions relating to environmental exposure; and exploring theoretical and methodological problems in the spatial analysis of environmental health. SIENA ultimately provides a much needed tool in the form of a controlled, simplified urban simulation model. 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Data and software availability The data described in this paper is freely available for download from the following website: http://www.integrated-assessment. eu/resource_centre/siena_data. The file SIENA.zip contains a collection of shapefiles which can be accessed using common GIS software such as ArcGIS or PostGIS. The different model components consisting of ArcInfo and SPSS scripts can be obtained from the authors upon request. Please contact the corresponding author for any enquirers.