BACKGROUND The inverse association between socioeconomic position (SEP) and health has been extensively explored in Italy; however few studies have been carried out on the relationship between income inequalities and health status or health services utilisation, particularly at a local level.The objective of this study is to test the association between the demand for hospital care and a small ...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To assess, within the multinational European Community funded APHEA project, the relationship between daily ambient air pollution with sulphur dioxide (SO2) and black smoke (BS) and the daily number of deaths from all causes except external, from cardiovascular diseases, and from respiratory diseases taking into account several possible confounding factors. DESIGN Time series ...

We describe the utilization of health services by men who have sex with men (MSM) in South African cities, their perceptions of available health services, and their service preferences. We triangulated data from 32 key informant interviews (KIIs), 18 focus group discussions (FGDs) with MSM in four cities, and a survey of 285 MSM in two cities, recruited through respondent-driven sampling in 200...

This study examines the social construction of collective memory regarding American cities. Inspired by postmodern theory, both critical and urban, it argues that, in its efforts to expand its political power, the Conservative Elite has successfully waged a thirty year “mnemonic war” over the public memory of America’s central cities. It describes how in their attack, the Conservatives strategi...

Ultrafine particles (UFPs; diameter less than 100 nm) are ubiquitous in urban air, and an acknowledged risk to human health. Globally, the major source for urban outdoor UFP concentrations is motor traffic. Ongoing trends towards urbanisation and expansion of road traffic are anticipated to further increase population exposure to UFPs. Numerous experimental studies have characterised UFPs in in...

The advent of geolocated information and communication technologies opens the possibility of exploring how people use space in cities, bringing an important new tool for urban scientists and planners, especially for regions where data are scarce or not available. Here we apply a functional network approach to determine land use patterns from mobile phone records. The versatility of the method a...

The objective of this paper is to assess whether establishments' innovation performance and innovation strategies differ by the size of the city in which they are located. Using the Canadian 1999 Survey of Innovation database (establishment-based), we find that establishments belonging to smaller cities (with populations of less than 50,000) are less likely to be associated to a world-first inn...

Despite the fact that cities are increasingly the fundamental socioeconomic units of human societies worldwide, a unified quantitative framework concerning urban form and function has yet to be established. As a step in this direction, we analyze settlement data from the Prehispanic Basin of Mexico to show that this system displays spatial scaling properties analogous to those observed for mode...