Spatial boundaries are a defining feature of a city’s social and spatial organization. Rivers, highways, and train tracks create excess distance between nearby locations and often mark social separation – they become dividing lines that are well known to residents. Qualitative studies are rich with insight about the local significance of boundaries, but they have been largely ignored in the qua...

background while there is currently no cure for multiple sclerosis (ms), treatment with biologic diseasemodifying drugs (bdmds) can reduce the impact of the condition on the lives of patients. in greece, the regulatory change in the distribution system of bdmds, limited their administration through the designated pharmacies of the national organization for healthcare services provision (eopyy) ...

Over the first half of the 19 century, the Prussian-German Customs Union known as the Zollverein gradually unified a scattered confederation of sovereign states under an internal free trade agreement. This paper uses grain prices to quantify the differential effect of the Zollverein for market integration among Zollverein members versus European powers that were not part of the Zollverein, incl...

BACKGROUND Evidence indicates that people who reside in non-urban areas have a higher use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) than people who reside in urban areas. However, there is sparse research on the reasons for such differences. This paper investigates the reasons for geographical differences in CAM use by comparing CAM users from four geographical areas (major cities, inner ...

City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across many countries. By far the most popular explanation for such power-law regularities is in terms of random growth processes, where power laws arise asymptotically from the assumption of iid growth rates among all cities within a given country. But this assumption has additional consequences. Since all subsets of citie...

BACKGROUND The World Health Organization recognises the importance of natural environments for human health. Evidence for natural environment-health associations comes largely from single countries or regions, with varied approaches to measuring natural environment exposure. We present a standardised approach to measuring neighbourhood natural environment exposure in cities in different regions...

BACKGROUND Epidemiologic studies have linked exposure to traffic-generated air and noise pollution with a wide range of adverse health effects in children. Children spend a large portion of time at school, and both air pollution and noise are elevated in close proximity to roads, so school location may be an important determinant of exposure. No studies have yet examined the proximity of school...