We study geographic political representation and distribution of local public goods within jurisdictions using geo-coded data on politicians, the electorate elementary schools. Descriptive analysis reveals that poorer neighborhoods are under-represented politicians have a strong support base in their home neighbourhoods. Based randomized election outcomes due to personal vote count ties, has ca...

Transportation infrastructure and transportation behaviors consume significant natural resources and are costly to municipalities, states, and the federal government. Small cities, in particular, may find themselves with high costs. Although transportation has been extensively investigated, methods that may enable small cities to act are still lacking. To investigate the influence that neighbor...

Young adults have the highest prevalence of smoking amongst all age groups. Significant uptake occurs after high school age. Although neighborhood exposures have been found to be associated with smoking behavior, research on neighborhood exposures and the smoking trajectories among young adults, and on the role of geographic scale in shaping findings, is scarce. We examined associations between...

OBJECTIVES Our objective was to examine the association between neighborhood linking social capital (a concept describing the amount of trust between individuals and societal institutions) and all-cause and cause-specific mortality in the elderly. DESIGN The entire Swedish population aged 65+, a total of 1,517,336 men and women, was followed from 1 January 2002 until death, emigration, or the...

The association of neighborhood built environment with walking activity has received growing attention, although most studies have relied upon subjective measures of the built environment and few have examined the relation between built environment and walking among older adults. This 2001 study examined the relation between objectively measured characteristics of the local neighborhood and wal...

Research on neighborhood food access has focused on documenting disparities in the food environment and on assessing the links between the environment and consumption. Relatively few studies have combined in-store food availability measures with geographic mapping of stores. We review research that has used these multi-dimensional measures of access to explore the links between the neighborhood...

At the neighborhood scale, recognizing urban community green space (UCGS) is important for residential living condition assessment and planning. However, current studies have embodied two key issues. Firstly, existing focused on large geographic scales, mixing rural areas, neglecting accuracy of contours at fine scales. Secondly, spaces covered by shadows often suffer misclassification. To addr...

Many scholars, policy analysts, and practitioners agree that neighborhoods are important contexts for urban youth. Yet, despite decades of research, our knowledge of why and how neighborhoods influence the day-to-day lives of youth is still emerging. Theories about neighborhood effects largely assume that neighborhoods operate to influence youth through exposure-based mechanisms. Extant theoret...

Identifying patterns and drivers of regional land use changes is crucial for supporting land management and planning. Doing so for mountain ecosystems in East Asia, such as the So-yang River Basin in South Korea, has until now been a challenge because of extreme social and ecological complexities. Applying the techniques of geographic information systems (GIS) and statistical modeling via multi...

PURPOSE In epidemiologic studies, neighborhood characteristics are often assigned to individuals based on a single residence despite the fact that people frequently move and, for most cancer outcomes, the relevant time-window of exposure is not known. The authors evaluated residential mobility patterns for a population-based series of childhood leukemia cases enrolled in the Northern California...