Suchergebnisse

There is evidence that good urban design, including street connectivity, facilitates walking for transport. We, therefore, piloted a short survey on 118 such walkways in nine suburbs in Wellington, New Zealand's capital. The instrument appeared feasible to use and performed well in terms of inter-rater reliability (median Kappa score for 15 items: 0.88). The study identified both favorable features (e.g., railings by steps), but also problematic ones (e.g., concerning graffiti, litter, and insufficient lighting and signage). There is scope for routinising the monitoring of walkway quality so that citizens and government agencies can work together to enhance urban walkability.

The aim of this article is to introduce a new stand-alone application—Geo-Segregation Analyzer—that is capable of calculating 43 residential segregation indices, regardless of the population groups or the metropolitan region under study. In practical terms, the user just needs to have a Shapefile geographic file containing counts of population groups that differ in ethnic origin, birth country, age, or income across a metropolitan area at a small area level (e.g., census tracts). Developed in Java using the GeoTools library, this free and open-source application is both multiplatform and multilanguage. The software functions on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems and its user interface currently supports 10 languages (English, French, Spanish, Catalan, German, Italian, Portuguese, Creole, Vietnamese, and Chinese). The application permits users to display and manipulate several Shapefile geographic files and to calculate 19 one-group indices, 13 two-group indices, 8 multigroup indices, and 3 local measures that could be mapped (location quotient, entropy measure, and typology of the ethnic areas proposed by Poulsen, Johnson, and Forrest).

Prior research has suggested that disadvantaged neighborhood contexts alter the etiology of youth antisocial behavior (ASB). Unfortunately, these studies have relied exclusively on governmental data collected in administratively-defined neighborhoods (e.g., Census tracts or block groups, zip codes), a less than optimal approach for studying neighborhood effects. It would thus be important to extend prior findings of GxE using neighborhood sampling techniques, in which disadvantage is assessed via resident informant-reports of the neighborhood. The current study sought to do just this, examining two independent twin samples from the Michigan State University Twin Registry. Neighborhood disadvantage was assessed via maternal and neighbor informant-reports, the latter of which were analyzed multiple ways (i.e., all neighbors within 1km, nearest neighbor, and all neighbors within the County). Analyses revealed clear and consistent evidence of moderation by neighborhood disadvantage, regardless of informant or the specific operationalization of neighborhood. Shared environmental influences on ASB were observed to be several-fold larger in disadvantaged contexts, while genetic influences were proportionally more influential in advantaged neighborhoods. Such findings indicate that neighborhood disadvantage exerts rather profound effects on the origins of youth ASB. Efforts should now be made to identify the active ingredients of neighborhood disadvantage.

Residents in US cities are exposed to high levels of stress and violent crime. At the same time, a number of cities have put forward "greening" efforts which may promote nature's calming effects and reduce stressful stimuli. Previous research has shown that greening may lower aggressive behaviors and violent crime. In this study we examined, for the first time, the longitudinal effects over a 30-year period of average city greenness on homicide rates across 290 major cities in the US, using multilevel linear growth curve modeling. Overall, homicide rates in US cities decreased over this time-period (52.1–33.5 per 100,000 population) while the average greenness increased slightly (0.41–0.43 NDVI). Change in average city greenness was negatively associated with homicide, controlling for a range of variables (β = −.30, p-value = .02). The results of this study suggest that efforts to increase urban greenness may have small but significant violence-reduction benefits.

Existing scholarship hypothesizes a causal chain from climate change to resource availability constraints, to forced migration and conflict risks. Limited research, however, synthesizes findings about the efficacy of interventions to alleviate resources conflict in communities hosting climate migrants. This systematic literature review identified and analyzed 33 studies that explore interventions contributing to climate conflict resolution and environmental peacebuilding in receiving and migrant communities. Despite limitations of current research, the review shows that multi-scale and cross-sectoral interventions are necessary though challenging to establish. Community-level initiatives and local support networks that create social capital are key interventions leading from conflict to cooperation between climate-driven migrants and host communities. However, such interventions often require external resources that come with strings attached. Our analysis also identifies gaps in the extant literature. First, few scholars explore how adaptive capacity—especially influenced by power relations among stakeholders in newly formed communities—evolves over time in response to multiple repeated threat factors. Second, there is limited research on whether and how external interventions can help climate refugees gain access rights to natural resources for long-term conflict avoidance. Finally, there is a lack of community-based performance evaluation metrics to assess long or short-term impacts of interventions.

Household water insecurity has serious implications for the health, livelihoods and wellbeing of people around the world. Existing methods to assess the state of household water insecurity focus largely on water quality, quantity or adequacy, source or reliability, and affordability. These methods have significant advantages in terms of their simplicity and comparability, but are widely recognized to oversimplify and underestimate the global burden of household water insecurity. In contrast, a broader definition of household water insecurity should include entitlements and human capabilities, socio-cultural dynamics, and political institutions and processes. This paper proposes a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods that can be widely adopted across cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts to assess hard-to-measure dimensions of household water insecurity. In doing so, it critically evaluates existing methods for assessing household water insecurity and suggests ways in which methodological innovations advance a broader definition of household water insecurity.