Healthy Places to Play, Learn, and Develop

Urban Health ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 102-111
Author(s):  
Renée Boynton-Jarrett

The urban environment is characterized by human-made spaces, by environments that are created to allow large numbers of people to coexist. These spaces literally shape where and how we play and work, representing an enormous opportunity for urban spaces to influence all aspects of our daily life—including our health. Although abundant urban areas have emerged over the past decades that disincentivize healthy living, innovation around the world is providing examples of approaches to urban design that generates healthy and safe places to play and work. This chapter provides a framework for thinking about the creation of urban spaces, about how the physical environment influences health, and how, to that end, we can create healthy physical environments to improve the health of urban populations.

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meixu Chen ◽  
Dani Arribas-Bel ◽  
Alex Singleton

Urban environments play a crucial role in the design, planning, and management of cities. Recently, as the urban population expands, the ways in which humans interact with their surroundings has evolved, presenting a dynamic distribution in space and time locally and frequently. Therefore, how to better understand the local urban environment and differentiate varying preferences for urban areas has been a big challenge for policymakers. This study leverages geotagged Flickr photographs to quantify characteristics of varying urban areas and exploit the dynamics of areas where more people assemble. An advanced image recognition model is used to extract features from large numbers of images in Inner London within the period 2013–2015. After the integration of characteristics, a series of visualisation techniques are utilised to explore the characteristic differences and their dynamics. We find that urban areas with higher population densities cover more iconic landmarks and leisure zones, while others are more related to daily life scenes. The dynamic results demonstrate that season determines human preferences for travel modes and activity modes. Our study expands the previous literature on the integration of image recognition method and urban perception analytics and provides new insights for stakeholders, who can use these findings as vital evidence for decision making.


Author(s):  
John Carman ◽  
Patricia Carman

What is—or makes a place—a ‘historic battlefield’? From one perspective the answer is a simple one—it is a place where large numbers of people came together in an organized manner to fight one another at some point in the past. But from another perspective it is far more difficult to identify. Quite why any such location is a place of battle—rather than any other kind of event—and why it is especially historic is more difficult to identify. This book sets out an answer to the question of what a historic battlefield is in the modern imagination, drawing upon examples from prehistory to the twentieth century. Considering battlefields through a series of different lenses, treating battles as events in the past and battlefields as places in the present, the book exposes the complexity of the concept of historic battlefield and how it forms part of a Western understanding of the world. Taking its lead from new developments in battlefield study—especially archaeological approaches—the book establishes a link to and a means by which these new approaches can contribute to more radical thinking about war and conflict, especially to Critical Military and Critical Security Studies. The book goes beyond the study of battles as separate and unique events to consider what they mean to us and why we need them to have particular characteristics. It will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, and students of modern war in all its forms.


1972 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 23-26
Author(s):  
Louise W. Holborn

While the world press has focused over the past year on problems surrounding the creation of still another refugee population in Africa — that of Uganda's Asians — far too little attention has been directed to the remarkable though still fragile process of repatriation and resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Southern Sudanese. This population of displaced persons includes both refugees who fled to other countries and large numbers of homeless who hid in the bush during the civil war that wracked the Sudan for seventeen years, from 1955 through the first months of 1972. Responding to the initiatives of President Gaafar al-Nimeiry of the Sudan, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (HCR), under an explicit mandate from the Secretary- General of the United Nations, has been raising funds, organizing activities on behalf of the most pressing needs and working closely with all local interests to meet overwhelming problems.


2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (17) ◽  
pp. 5313-5325 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Stephens ◽  
S. Madronich ◽  
F. Wu ◽  
J. B. Olson ◽  
R. Ramos ◽  
...  

Abstract. Surface pollutant concentrations in México City show a distinct pattern of weekly variations similar to that observed in many other cities of the world. Measurements of the concentrations of carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx=NO+NO2), particulate matter smaller than 10 μm (PM10), and ozone (O3) collected hourly over 22 years (1986–2007) at 39 urban monitoring locations were analyzed. Morning concentrations of CO, NOx, and PM10 are lower on Saturdays and even more so on Sundays, compared to workdays (Monday–Friday), while afternoon O3 concentrations change minimally and are occasionally even higher. This weekend effect is empirical evidence that photochemical O3 production is NOx-inhibited, and to the extent that emissions of CO are proportional to those of reactive volatile organic compounds (VOCs), it is VOC-limited, at least in the urban areas for which the monitoring stations are representative. The VOC-limitation has increased in the past decade, due to decreases in the concentrations of CO (and presumably VOCs) and consequent decreases in the CO/NOx and VOC/NOx ratios. Enhancements of photolysis frequencies resulting from smaller weekend aerosol burdens are not negligible, but fall short of being an alternate explanation for the observed weekend effect. The strength of the weekend effect indicates that local radical termination occurs primarily via formation of nitric acid and other NOx-related compounds, some of which (e.g. peroxy acyl nitrates) can contribute to the regional NOx budget. While VOC emission reductions would be most effective in reducing local O3 production, NOx emission reduction may be more important for controlling regional oxidants.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 139-147
Author(s):  
Marjona Akhmadovna Radjabova ◽  

Abstract. The following article discusses the role of onomastic components in phraseological units and their meaning as well as giving a classification of onomastic components in phraseological units based on the materials of different structural languages. Through examples the author proves that the presence of names in the ancient rich phraseological layer of non-fraternal English, Russian and Uzbek languages is related to the national and cultural values, customs, ancient history, folklore and daily life of the peoples who speak this language. Besides, in the process of study of onomastic components it is also determined that names, along with forming their national character, are a factor giving information about the past of a particular nation. Background. In the world linguistics there have been carried out a series of researches in the field of the study of phraseological units with onomastic components in comparative-typological aspect revaling their national and cultural peculiarities, analyzing and classifying their content structurally and semantically


A Child's Day ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 165-178
Author(s):  
Killian Mullan

This concluding chapter surveys the key findings and issues raised in the previous chapters. This study of a child's day provides the most extensive picture currently available in the UK, and elsewhere in the world, into how children's time use has changed over the past several decades. It identifies areas of expected change as well as other areas of surprising stability. It reveals how change and stability in children's time use blend together to comprise a child's day, uncovering also the multi-layered contexts of a child's day. Aspects of children's time use, and how this may have changed, will no doubt continue to surface in public debate in connection with their well-being. While welcoming this, it is necessary to always question and seek to understand how supposed changes actually fit within a child's day, the types of days where these changes are concentrated, among whom, and to seek out evidence on how such changes relate to other activities and the social contexts of daily life.


2018 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 01130
Author(s):  
Vladimir Filatov ◽  
Grigory Yazev ◽  
Oksana Sagina

The issues of revitalization of urban areas on the basis of industrial parks at the present stage are considered in this paper. The development of a new service industry of territorial development - industrial parks – has started in Russia less than 10 years ago and gradually acquires a systemic character. The issues of revitalization of urban areas are extremely relevant for many Russian cities. In the conditions of the necessity to search for new drivers for the economic growth of cities, to improve the quality of the urban environment, to increase the efficiency of the use of urban areas, an important task of finding and elaborating of innovation models for the development of industrial zones arises. A rich experience of reforming such areas has been accumulated in the world practice.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-194
Author(s):  
Dinabandhu Mondal ◽  
Sucharita Sen

In the past few decades, due to urbanization and spatial expansion of cities beyond their municipal boundaries, complex interactions between the city and its surrounding rural areas have occurred, resulting in the formation of peri-urban spaces or zones of transition. There is a plurality of definitions for these peri-urban spaces, due to their diverse character in terms of land and water use, livelihood shifts, demographic and social transitions. Most peri-urban areas, specifically those around large metropolitan cities, are increasingly assuming complex characters, which call for governance structures beyond rural–urban binaries. For any administrative intervention of a serious nature in peri-urban areas, a standard methodology for demarcation of these spaces is required. This article is an attempt to develop and apply such a methodology beyond the existing ones, using government sources of data, in the case of Kolkata Metropolis. This article uses socio-economic and land-use characteristics to achieve this objective. It finds that peri-urban spaces do not necessarily develop uniformly around the city; instead, they are fragmented and could be located both near or relatively far from urban areas.


The realization that the behaviour of the Earth has changed radically during geological time has come about largely in the last decade. This development, which constitutes one of the major advances in geological thinking, results from the study of Precambrian phenomena in many parts of the world and in particular from the work of a small number of geochronologists. In the last ten years as large numbers of unfossiliferous Precambrian rocks have been dated, it has become clear that the nature of geological processes has varied throughout geological time and that one of the cardinal doctrines of geology - the concept that the present is the key to the past — could not be applied to the study of the early history of the Earth.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 122-133
Author(s):  
Bogusław Wojtyszyn

Abstract The article concerns urban spaces highly responsible for climate change in the country, Europe, and the world. This topic is now of major importance because it reflects on every citizen of Europe and the world in that we all confront the necessity of climate protection and adaptation also in law, to climate change in urban areas. It is associated with a radical change of lifestyle in the world’s cities, mainly in terms of energy consumption and its methods of production. The research results presented in the article indicate the need to adapt current methods for slowing down adverse climate change into functional and spatial systems of urban development and their economic, legal, and social conditions affecting the pace of implementation of new technologies for climate-friendly sources such as low-carbon, energy-saving, and renewable energy. Attention was also paid to the possibility of ecological revitalization of the existing urban structure of buildings, among other things, in order to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions adversely affecting the climate. On the other hand, modern ideas for an Eco-City and solutions for a Green-City and Solar-City, presented in the article, implemented through sustainable development in the field of planning activities and energy management methods, can be additional indicators of the direction of sustainable development for Polish cities for climate protection and adaptation to its changes.


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