Cities in developing countries are expanding at a tremendous rate and informal settlements (where 40 to 80% of city dwellers live) occur in unplanned urban areas. In planned cities in developed countries, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and cellular automata (CA) are favourable tools for modelling urban dynamics. This paper discusses the growth of informal settlements, describes the tools ...

BACKGROUND Preventing intimate partner violence (IPV) remains a global public health challenge. Studies suggest urban informal settlements have particularly high levels of IPV and HIV-prevalence and these settlements are rapidly growing. The current evidence base of effective approaches to preventing IPV recognizes the potential of combining economic strengthening and gender transformative inte...

The land of Turkey has hosted various civilizations throughout history, and it has diverse architectural heritages left from these civilizations. Rural areas and settlements can be seen as the pure reflection of geographical and cultural environment as well as historical and economical. However, today as a consequence of modernisation, the traditional architectural pattern in the rural settleme...

In developing countries like South Africa processed geographic information systems (GIS) data on land suitability, is often not available for land use management. Data in this article is based on a published article "The strategically located land index support system for humans settlements land reform in South Africa" (Musakwa et al., 2017) [1]. This article utilities data from Musakwa et al. ...

BACKGROUND Children living in Roma settlements in Central and Eastern Europe face extreme levels of social exclusion and poverty, but their health status has not been well studied. The objective of this study was to elucidate risk factors for malnutrition in children in Roma settlements in Serbia. METHODS Anthropometric and sociodemographic measures were obtained for 1192 Roma children under ...

In recent years, “Bottom-up Planning Approach” has been widely accepted and expanded from planning theorists. Citizen participation becomes more important in decision-making in informal settlements. Many of previous projects and strategies due to ignorance of citizen participation, have been failed facing with informal settlements and in some cases lead physical expansion of these neighbourhood...

In the present study we address the question of how persons or families occupy specific locations according to an attractiveness function between persons and flats. We suggest a mathematically formulated model in order to find optimal distributions of persons over flats. The model maximizes the global attractiveness of the ensemble and accounts for various conflicting situations. Its solutions ...

Many urban settlements result from a spatially distributed, decentralized building process. Here we analyze the topological patterns of organization of a large collection of such settlements using the approach of complex networks. The global efficiency (based on the inverse of shortest-path lengths), robustness to disconnections and cost (in terms of length) of these graphs is studied and their...

Reductions in hunter-gatherer mobility during the Late Pleistocene influenced settlement ecologies, altered human relations with animal communities, and played a pivotal role in domestication. The influence of variability in human mobility on selection dynamics and ecological interactions in human settlements has not been extensively explored, however. This study of mice in modern African villa...