UNLABELLED BACKGROUND Increased density of fast food restaurants is associated with increased prevalence of obesity in developed countries. However, less is known about this relationship in developing countries undergoing rapid urbanization and how differences in neighbourhood income affect the patronage of fast food outlets. The purpose of the study is to explore the differences in fast foo...

The traditional focus of scheduling research is on finding schedules with a low implementation cost. However, in many real world scheduling applications finding a robust or flexible schedule is just as important. A robust schedule is a quality schedule expected to still be acceptable if something unforeseen happens, while a flexible schedule is a quality schedule expected to be easy to change. ...

The neighbourhood in both the UK and Europe continues to dominate thinking about the quality of life in local communities, representation and empowerment, and how local services can be delivered most effectively. For several decades a series of centrally funded programmes in neighbourhood governance have targeted localities suffering deprivation and social exclusion in England. From these much ...

A review of published observational studies of neighbourhoods and depression/depressive symptoms was conducted to inform future directions for the field. Forty-five English-language cross-sectional and longitudinal studies that analysed the effect of at least one neighbourhood-level variable on either depression or depressive symptoms were analysed. Of the 45 studies, 37 reported associations o...

Background Healthy urban environments require careful planning and a testing of environmental quality that goes beyond statutory requirements. Moreover, it requires the inclusion of resident views, perceptions and experiences that help deepen the understanding of local (public health) problems. To facilitate this, neighbourhoods should be mapped in a way that is relevant to them. One way to do ...

The proportion of people living in densely built up areas is gradually increasing, forcing cities to generate new land to build homes upon. In this process there is a risk for an inexplicit decrease of green space. The green features of neighbourhoods help to create a supportive environment for health and physical activity, thus a reduction of greenness may reduce the general well-being in the ...

We investigated the association between the neighbourhood socioeconomic environment and physical inactivity, and explored the contribution of neighbourhood characteristics to this association. Data were analysed of 20-69 years old participants of the Dutch GLOBE study who lived in 78 neighbourhoods of Eindhoven (n = 8.767). The neighbourhood socioeconomic environment was assessed from aggregate...

This paper provides the first causal evidence on impact of retirement housing choices. Our empirical strategy exploits discontinuity in eligibility ages for state pension as an instrument endogenous decision and controls time-invariant individual characteristics. The results show that leads to a statistically significant sizable increase probability making residential move or likelihood becomin...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To assess the relations between characteristics of the neighbourhood internal and external built environment and past six month and lifetime depression. DESIGN AND SETTING Depression and sociodemographic information were assessed in a cross sectional survey of residents of New York City (NYC). All respondents were geocoded to neighbourhood of residence. Data on the quality of ...