BACKGROUND Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is a predominantly rural disease, common in the low lands of eastern Nepal. Since 1997 VL cases have also been reported among residents of the city of Dharan. Our main research objective was to find out whether there had been local transmission of VL inside the city. METHODS We conducted an outbreak investigation including a case-control study; cases wer...

This study explores the connections between vegetation cover change, environmental stewardship, and building footprint change in New York City neighborhoods from the years 2000 to 2010. We use a mixed-methods multidisciplinary approach to analyze spatially explicit social and ecological data. Most neighborhoods lost vegetation during the study period. Neighborhoods that gained vegetation tended...

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...

This paper uses unique data on Philadelphia’s nonprofit organizations compiled from IRS listings, city cultural fund grant applications, telephone directories and newspaper listings in 1997 and 2003 to test Wilson’s (1987) hypothesis that inner-city neighborhoods suffer from a dearth of social institutions. The author integrates these data with demographic information from the 2000 census to ex...

Human exposure to excessively warm weather, especially in cities, is an increasingly important public health problem. This study examined heat-related health inequalities within one city in order to understand the relationships between the microclimates of urban neighborhoods, population characteristics, thermal environments that regulate microclimates, and the resources people possess to cope ...

The Quantified Community (QC)—a long-term neighborhood informatics research initiative—is a network of instrumented urban neighborhoods that collect, measure, and analyze data on physical and environmental conditions and human behavior to better understand how neighborhoods and the built environment affect individual and social well-being. This initiative is intended to create a data-enabled re...

Studies of political participation typically analyze voting, contentious collective action, or membership in voluntary associations. Few scholars investigate a more mundane—but highly consequential—form of neighborhood politics: requests for basic city services. We conceptualize city service requests as a direct, instrumental contact with local government that alters the geographical distributi...

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...

INTRODUCTION New York City Article 47 regulations, implemented in 2007, require licensed child care centers to improve the nutrition, physical activity, and television-viewing behaviors of enrolled children. To supplement an evaluation of the Article 47 regulations, we conducted an exploratory ecologic study to examine changes in childhood obesity prevalence among low-income preschool children ...

Adapting methodology from resilience theory in ecology, we develop an empirical model of the response of the New York City public health ecosystem to sudden disaster. Contrary to cultural expectation, 'good' and 'bad' neighborhoods-starkly differentiated by public health status reflecting longstanding economic and racial segregation-respond similarly to challenge. This suggests that the differe...