The social forces that affect individual health are powerful and yet poorly understood. For example, the health burden of asthma is especially large for residents of low-income, inner-city neighborhoods. At the same time, many inner-city residents face health challenges associated with high levels of violence in their communities. Recent work has linked exposure to community violence with worse...

BACKGROUND In 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded Play Across Boston to address disparities in access to physical activity facilities and programs for Boston, Mass, inner-city youths. CONTEXT Local stakeholders worked with the Harvard School of Public Health Prevention Research Center and Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society to impro...

Inner-city business development is often proposed as a solution to inner-city poverty. However, research evidence suggests that creating new jobs in the inner city is unlikely by itself to significantly increase the employment or earnings of the inner city poor. Public subsidies for inner city business development may be justified by greater environmental, congestion, and fiscal benefits of inn...

This study investigated correlates of outdoor advertising panel density in predominantly African American neighborhoods in New York City. Research shows that black neighborhoods have more outdoor advertising space than white neighborhoods, and these spaces disproportionately market alcohol and tobacco advertisements. Thus, understanding the factors associated with outdoor advertising panel dens...

Studies that examine spatial character-istics of urban unemployment are oftenbased on some simplistic and problematicmeasures of employment accessibility. Thispaper presents a refined methodologicalframework for measuring accessibility,which enables the researcher to (1) improvethe measurement by accounting for job com-petition among workers commuting by dif-...

Some archaeologists have suggested recently that clusters of houses at Classic Maya sites functioned as urban neighborhoods. This article presents comparative historical and ethnographic data from low-density cities to support this interpretation. I review two Mesoamerican cases: the Aztec calpolli and the modern Tzotzil house cluster; and urban clusters in two African cases: the Nupe city of B...

Although many low-income urban areas are highly walkable by conventional measures such as population density or land use mix, chronic diseases related to lack of physical activity are more common among residents of these areas. Disparities in neighborhood conditions may make poor areas less attractive environments for walking, offsetting the advantages of density and land use mix. This study co...