growing population and increasing urbanization has led to the expansion of informal settlements. informal settlements in developing countries, more than other urban tissues are exposed to various risks and natural disasters. this type of settlements, often develop and spread without regard to natural hazards, with no specific plan and no attention to regulations. expansion of informal settlemen...

Many urban designers and researchers argue that walkable urban environments can encourage older residents' walking activities that benefit their physical health. However, walking also exposes older adults to safety risks, including due to traffic accidents. This study seeks to reveal the interactions between urban form and safety affecting urban baby boomers' walking behavior. Spatial analysis ...

We investigate the impact of neighborhood structural characteristics, social organization, and culture on self-rated health in a large, cross-sectional sample of urban adults. Findings indicate that neighborhood affluence is a more powerful predictor of health status than poverty, above and beyond individual demographic background, socioeconomic status, health behaviors, and insurance coverage....

Systematic social observation has been used as a health research methodology for collecting information from the neighborhood physical and social environment. The objectives of this article were to describe the operationalization of direct observation of the physical and social environment in urban areas and to evaluate the instrument's reliability. The systematic social observation instrument ...

In some spatial applications the objects of interest are fields, caused by spatially distributed sources, and one of the central questions is to find neighborhood relations between these fields. The motivating example for this paper is a cellular network: base transceiver stations transmit signals with continuous distribution, the signal strength, in an urban environment. In order to avoid inte...

Community coalitions facilitate changes in community outcomes and conditions by addressing issues and determinants of health and well-being. The purpose of the present study was to examine the process of a community coalition, the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council (INC), in addressing community-prioritized urban health determinants aimed at improving living conditions in a neighborhood in Kansas Cit...

While many associations between neighborhood characteristics and individual well-being have been reported, there is a lack of longitudinal studies that could provide evidence for or against causal interpretations of neighborhood effects. This study examined whether neighborhood urbanicity and socioeconomic status were associated with within-individual variation in depression, mistrust and socia...

abstract quality of life is a many-sided and complex concept and includes not only physical aspects of life. measuring and discovering this concept depends on many factors such as cultural, social, economical and even environmental. in this research, the connection between women’s quality of life and their access to public utilities and municipal services, health level and safety level of neigh...

It is now generally accepted that spatially-based neighborhood or contextual attributes influence individual behaviors. However, studies of contextual effects often operationalize “neighborhoods” as static, single-level administrative units that are chosen for data availability rather than theoretical reasons. This practice has led to new calls for sound conceptual models that guide data collec...

This article focuses on neighborhood and geographic change arising with the first "selection" of an independent residential setting: the transition out of the family home. Data from two sources-the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics-are used to provide complementary analyses of trajectories of change in geographic location and neighborh...