Jurisdictional spillover effects of sprawl on injuries and fatalities

Crash risk, crash exposure, and the built environment: A conceptual review

This paper reviews the literature on the relationship between the built environment and roadway safety, with a focus on studies that analyse small geographical units, such as census tracts or travel analysis zones. We review different types of built environment measures to analyse if there are consistent relationships between such measures and crash frequency, finding that for many built environment variables there are mixed or contradictory correlations. We turn to the treatment of exposure, because built environment measures are often used, either explicitly or implicitly, as measures of exposure. We find that because exposure is often not adequately controlled for, correlations between built environment features and crash rates could be due to either higher levels of exposure or higher rates of crash risk per unit of exposure. Then, we identify various built environment variables as either more related to exposure, more related to risk, or ambiguous, and recommend further targeted research on those variables whose relationship is currently ambiguous.

Resident Perceptions of Neighborhood Conditions, Food Access, Transportation Usage, and Obesity in a Rapidly Changing Central City

There is a lack of research on obesity that uses primary data and fine-grained information on neighborhoods. I use primary data for 367 participants in Detroit to examine neighborhood predictors of obesity. These data were supplemented with public data. I considered multilevel and spatial modeling, but the data lent itself best to ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions. I find that socioeconomic factors, the built environment, transportation usage, and perceptions of neighborhoods are important predictors of obesity. Importantly, litter is associated with higher levels of obesity. Planners can take measures to reduce litter and collaborate with other policy-makers to encourage less driving, though drawing direct lines of causality is complicated.

From built environment to health inequalities: An explanatory framework based on evidence

OBJECTIVE

The Health in All Policies strategy aims to engage every policy domain in health promotion. The more socially disadvantaged groups are usually more affected by potential negative impacts of policies if they are not health oriented. The built environment represents an important policy domain and, apart from its housing component, its impact on health inequalities is seldom assessed.

METHODS

A scoping review of evidence on the built environment and its health equity impact was carried out, searching both urban and medical literature since 2000 analysing socio-economic inequalities in relation to different components of the built environment.

RESULTS

The proposed explanatory framework assumes that key features of built environment (identified as density, functional mix and public spaces and services), may influence individual health through their impact on both natural environment and social context, as well as behaviours, and that these effects may be unequally distributed according to the social position of individuals.

CONCLUSION

In general, the expected links proposed by the framework are well documented in the literature; however, evidence of their impact on health inequalities remains uncertain due to confounding factors, heterogeneity in study design, and difficulty to generalize evidence that is still very embedded to local contexts.