OBJECTIVES To describe the prevalence and determinants of births by caesarean section in private and public health facilities in underserved communities in South Asia. DESIGN Cross-sectional study. SETTING 81 community-based geographical clusters in four locations in Bangladesh, India and Nepal (three rural, one urban). PARTICIPANTS 45,327 births occurring in the study areas between 2005 ...

We present an approach for detecting loop closures in a large sequence of omni-directional images of urban environments. In particular we investigate the efficacy of global gist descriptors computed for 360 cylindrical panoramas and compare it with the baseline vocabulary tree approach. In the context of loop closure detection, we describe a novel matching strategy for panoramic views, exploiti...

This paper presents an approach to automated identification of slum area change patterns in Hyderabad, India, using multi-year and multi-sensor very high resolution satellite imagery. It relies upon a lacunarity-based slum detection algorithm, combined with Cannyand LSD-based imagery pre-processing routines. This method outputs plausible and spatially explicit slum locations for the whole urban...

Investigations are described into the use of a compact, portable unit, using polychromatic scattered light, for the preliminary monitoring airborne PM 2–10 particulates over widespread urban areas subjected to vehicular traffic. The monitoring unit has been used at a city centre bus terminus, at sites along an urban bus corridor and outside a local school adjacent to an air quality monitoring s...

This article reinterprets, under a common framework, previous results on location choice under delivered pricing. The paper clearly identifies the economic forces which explain why the socially optimal locations are an equilibrium of the location-price game in some models, and why they are not an equilibrium in other models. The paper shows that the rationale behind Hamilton et al. (Reg Sci Urb...

Urban areas are becoming increasingly important for wildlife as diminishing natural habitats no longer represent a suitable environment for many species. Red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) are nowadays common in many cities worldwide, and in recent years they have colonized urban areas in Estonia. We used a public web-based questionnaire approach to evaluate the distribution and behaviour of Estonian ur...

BACKGROUND Food access is a global issue, and for this reason, a wealth of studies are dedicated to understanding the location of food deserts and the benefits of urban gardens. However, few studies have linked these two strands of research together to analyze whether urban gardening activity may be a step forward in addressing issues of access for food desert residents. METHODS The Phoenix, ...

Urbanization is a global problem with demographic trends. The urban heat island plays a dominant role in local climate systems. Despite existing efforts to understand the impacts of multiple urbanization factors on the urban heat island globally, very little is known about the attribution of urban heat island magnitude to urbanization in different locations or developmental phases. In this stud...

There is a need for a more integrated and flexible approach to core area urban redevelopment at a time when pressures to maximise economic returns from inner city land threaten to disrupt the livelihoods and established social networks of many urban poor communities. This paper draws upon the experiences of established planning and partnership redevelopment strategies (i.e. land sharing, land r...

OBJECTIVES Injury related to violent acts is a problem in every society. Although some authors have examined the geography of violent crime, few have focused on the spatio-temporal patterns of violent injury and none have used an ambulance dataset to explore the spatial characteristics of injury. The purpose of this study was to describe the combined spatial and temporal characteristics of viol...