BACKGROUND Canadian cities are becoming more segregated by income. As such, investigation is required into the magnitude of health disparity between low-, average- and high-income neighbourhoods in order to quantify the level of health disparity at the scale of an urban city. METHODS A cross-sectional ecological study design was used to review all hospital discharges, physician visits, medica...

Neighbourhood Selection of Non-Western Ethnic Minorities: Testing the Own-Group Preference Hypothesis Using a Conditional Logit Model The selective inflow and outflow of residents by ethnicity is the main mechanism behind ethnic residential segregation. Many studies have found that ethnic minorities are more likely than others to move to ethnic minority concentration neighbourhoods. An importan...

This paper, in a first part, reviews current literature on the effects of ethnic and social segregation on children and adolescents. In a second part, it reports results of an empirical study on this issue conducted by the author in two German cities. In recent research, the effects of segregation have been framed as possible ‘contextual effects’ of neighbourhoods, i.e. as separate factors beyo...

OBJECTIVE Many studies have shown that poor health status and harmful health behaviour occur more frequently in deprived neighbourhoods. Most studies show modest associations between area level socioeconomic factors, the neighbourhood context, and health outcomes. However, estimates for the contextual effects vary. It is unclear if this variation is attributable to differences in methodology. T...

In this paper, we use census tract data to analyse changes in neighbourhood income inequality and residential economic segregation in the eight largest Canadian cities during the 1980-95 period. Is the income gap between richer and poorer neighbourhoods rising? Are high and low-income families increasingly clustered in economically homogeneous neighbourhoods? The main results are an elaboration...

OBJECTIVE We investigated the independent association between several neighbourhood built environment features and physical inactivity within a national sample of Canadian youth, and estimated the proportion of inactivity within the population that was attributable to these built environment features. METHODS This was a cross-sectional study of 6626 youth aged 11-15 years from 272 schools acr...

We briefly review previous attempts to generate near-optimal solutions of the Traveling Salesman Problem by applying Genetic Algorithms. Following the lines of Johnson [1990] we discuss some possibilities for speeding up classical Local Search algorithms by casting them into a genetic frame. In an experimental study two such approaches, viz. Genetic Local Search with 2-Opt neighbourhoods and Li...

BACKGROUND Supportive neighbourhood walking conditions are particularly important for older people as they age and who, as a group, prefer walking as a form of physical activity. Urban form and socio-economic status (SES) can influence neighbourhood walking behaviour. The objectives of this study were: a) to examine how urban form and neighbourhood SES inter-relate to affect the experiences of ...