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Urban expressways can generate excessive noise in the surrounding urban areas, and it tends to be more complex in mountainous cities, due to the undulating terrain, dense population and compact urban structures. This article aims to investigate the objective acoustic environment and road traffic noise exposure, including the noisy evaluation, annoyance and effect of roadside apartments in residential areas close to urban expressways in the high-density, high-rise, mountainous city of Chongqing. Three housing estates were selected for a series of field measurements, questionnaire surveys and noise mapping. There was a significant negative correlation between night-time noise levels and the distances to the urban expressway ( p < 0.01). Moreover, the differences between the daytime and night-time noise levels were generally insignificant (0.7 to 3.6 dBA) at the roadside locations. Differences in reaction to noise exposure in a variety of both person-related and housing condition variables were found, especially between roadside and non-roadside locations or residents. In addition, 75.0% of roadside residents identified the traffic noise as ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ annoying, and 66.7% of them regarded the acoustic environment as the priority environmental factor that needs to be improved. Difference in the ‘bedroom-window orientation’ had a significant effect on subjective noise evaluation. Rectangular-shaped apartments along the roadside obtain better noise reduction capacities than tower-blocks through the simulation. The acoustic performance of road cuttings, as an appropriately designed earth embankment, is improved along with deeper vertical alignment, and slope angles of 30° and 75° should be avoided.

Traditionally, Chinese families have been the primary provider of care for older adults, and older people expected family care. However, along with the modernization and demographic transition, family functions have been weakened, and state-based care has begun to play an essential role in supporting family care for older people. This paper aims to assess the care preferences of older people and the different responsibilities of individuals and communities in modern China. Using data from the 2014 China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey (CLASS) and multinomial logistic regression modeling, we find that family care remains the cornerstone for older adults and their care preferences are associated with individual and community factors, mainly including the number of children, education level, residential area, the presence of health infrastructure and care facilities, and the values associated with filial piety of older adults.

The urban heat island effect problem in Chinese cities is becoming a serious problem. How to reduce urban environmental temperature through urban design is a particularly important consideration. T...

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are considered to be persistent organic pollutants, which pose a great threat to human health and the surrounding environment. In order to explore the influence of informal electronic waste (e-waste) dismantling activities on inhabitants who live nearby, soil samples were collected from informal e-waste dismantling areas in Xinqiao, China and analysed for 16 United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) priority PAHs. Results indicated that the 16 USEPA priority PAHs were found at all seven sampling locations. Sampling location 3, which was only 10 m away from a residential area, had 1053.69 μg kg−1 of PAHs and seriously exceeded the standard value specified by the Netherlands. The total percents of 4-ring and 5-ring PAHs accounted for 61.74 and 71.70%, respectively, indicating that most of the detected PAHs belonged to high-ring PAHs. The informal e-waste dismantling activities are the major sources of soil PAHs in Xinqiao. Furthermore, the concentration of seven carcinogenic PAHs was 114.76 μg kg−1 and represented a potential health risk to humans. Thereinto, benzo[a]pyrene contributed the most, accounting for more than 50% in these locations. Our results may provide a reference about the influence of informal e-waste dismantling activities on the surrounding inhabitants and suggest that e-waste dismantling activities must be conducted in a formal enterprise which is far away from residential areas.

This study assesses the externality of three new master-planned housing estate development projects on an old residential area in Hong Kong. Replicating the methodology of an event study, this paper presents the changes to the market values and the turnover of property transactions of the apartments in the existing neighbourhood before and after the successive completion of these three new projects over a period of 10 years. Our findings have identified a diverse picture about the impacts of these new housing estates on the neighbourhood. Positive externalities occur under specific circumstances related to the facility provision, spatial design and interfacing with the neighbourhood and background of the new projects. Housing externality does not depend only on the degree of geographical proximity. The policy implication is that urban planning can expand the positive spillover of infill redevelopment not only by replacing the urban dis-amenities by new buildings, but also through a responsive and beneficial integration of the new development with the existing neighbourhood.

This article highlights the negative consequences of the provisional musical performance in the cities, particularly at the places that are not adjusted for this kind of performances. In the article, there is an appeal made to the need for a comprehensive solution in the form of noise studies and also an algorithm of solution is presented. It is important to achieve the permissible values of noise level in front of house facades for obtaining acoustical comfort in interior of buildings. This article presents the solution of the negative consequences of the provisional musical performance in the cities, particularly at the places that are not adjusted for this kind of performances. The solution for practice is the creation of algorithm for solving music performance in the cities.

Social conflict can be mobilised to achieve progressive and/or regressive change. Focusing on urban land conflicts that relate to property rights, I examine how commonly held understandings of this phenomenon may risk glossing over conflict that emerges because of the property rights themselves, as well as legitimating only certain types of conflict as worthy of activism and scholarly engagement. Using the example of Thokoza, a largely residential area outside of Johannesburg, I juxtapose an understanding of conflict as being related to ‘distributional’ inequalities with that of conflict emerging from the inherent nature of property rights. This illustrates the complementary value of thinking about conflict caused by property rights themselves in analysing urban land conflicts.

Today there is a continuing increase in both absolute and relative numbers of old people in the Turkish population. Paradoxically, this category of people is devalued and portrayed through deficiency and insufficiency in modern capitalist society. It is critical to emphasize that old age groups have some agency that helps to transform society. Certainly, one of the most important kinds of agency they have is a political one, depending on parameters such as gender, level of educational attainment, residential area, and health status. The research included a field study drawing upon the quantitative data gathered through structured interviews conducted with a sample of 416 people aged 65 and above, and the qualitative data gathered through in-depth interviews conducted with 16 people chosen from the same research population. Drawing upon Giddens' Structuration Theory, this article revealed that although majority of old people are not highly engaged to politics, heterogeneity among old people should be taken into consideration while examining the forms and the levels of political agency. Particularly old people who are living at the urban center, having a higher degree of educational attainment, and being healthier and male are much more likely to have a higher political agency.

The PM10 contributed in the e-waste dismantling community at Banmaichaiyaphot District, Buriram Province, was investigated due to the e-waste dismantling houses randomly located neighboring non-e-waste dismantling houses. The sampling was performed at non- and e-wastes dismantling houses and compared with the reference house in Daengyai subdistrict. The 24-hour average outdoor PM10 concentrations (81.957 ± 18.724 μg/m3) at e-waste dismantling sites were higher than those of the non-e-waste dismantling houses (80.943 ± 32.740 μg/m3) and control house (36.717 ± 19.516 μg/m3). The 24-hour average indoors PM10 concentrations of the e-waste dismantling houses (116.171 ± 64.635 μg/m3) showed higher concentrations than those of the non-e-waste dismantling (113.637 ± 64.641 μg/m3) and reference house (70.907 ± 22.464 μg/m3), but there were no statistically significant differences ( P > .05). Both indoor and outdoor PM10 concentrations between non- and e-waste dismantling houses did not have significant differences, whereas those of non- and e-waste dismantling houses were significantly higher than that of the reference house locating approximately 5 km away. The positive correlation between indoor and outdoor concentrations of non- and e-waste dismantling houses was satisfactory significant with the r of .613 and .825, respectively. The results indicate that the existing indoor PM10 of either non- or e-waste dismantling houses could result from neighborhood e-waste dismantling.

Aim: The purpose of the present study is to examine the prevalence of active commuting and factors associated with participation in active commuting in the municipality of Karlskrona, Sweden. Active commuting is defined here as walking or cycling to and from school/work for at least 15 minutes one-way. Method: A cross-sectional study was carried out, which included baseline data from parents-to-be. Pregnant females and their partners were invited to participate in the study when they contacted either of the municipality’s two antenatal clinics. Data collection ran from March 2008 to February 2009. When completing the questionnaire, the participants were asked to reflect on their situation one month before the female became pregnant. The final sample consisted of 432 participants (response rate 51.9% for females and 85.0% for males). Results: The main mode of commuting was motor vehicle (63.0%), with active commuters forming a minority (8.3%). The main facilitating factor for active commuting was living in an urban as opposed to a rural area. Regular participation in outdoor recreational physical activity was significantly positively associated with active commuting. Being Swedish and being surrounded by a green space environment were significantly negatively associated with active commuting. Conclusions: This study found that the number of people who are active commuters is modest and other modes of transportation are preferred. Several facilitating and impeding factors associated with active commuting were also found, indicating the importance of applying a broad health-promoting approach to encouraging active commuting.

Questionnaire and interview studies suggest that music is valued for its role in managing the listener’s impression of the environment, but systematic investigations on the topic are scarce. We present a field experiment wherein participants were asked to rate their impression of four different environments (a quiet residential area, traveling by train in the suburbs, at a busy crossroads, and in a tranquil park area) on bipolar adjective scales, while listening to music (which varied regarding level of perceived activation and valence) or in silence. Results showed that the evaluation of the environment was in general affected in the direction of the characteristics of the music, especially in conditions where the perceived characteristics of the music and environment were incongruent. For example, highly active music increased the activation ratings of environments which were perceived as inactive without music, whereas inactive music decreased the activation ratings of environments which were perceived as highly active without music. Also, highly positive music increased the positivity ratings of the environments. In sum, the findings suggest that music may function as a prism that modifies the impression of one’s surroundings. Different theoretical explanations of the results are discussed.

New public transport investment can improve accessibility for existing and new users of the urban transport network and this can lead to land value uplift with uplift benefits being distributed in relation to the proximity of the location of the property to the infrastructure. This paper quantifies land value uplift and its spatial distribution for accessibility to different destinations for residential properties around a new-build Liverpool Parramatta transitway for buses in a suburban area of south-west Sydney, Australia. Geographically weighted regression (GWR) is used to take account of spatial dependency in the estimation process with the results being presented in map form. Results indicate that property prices are mainly determined by the property’s internal features and the neighbourhood effects, but accessibility by car and accessibility to employment along the transitway also contribute non-marginally. The GWR local model shows that accessibility varies significantly over geographical space demonstrating the advantages of this approach.

This article asks how social engagement influences individuals' immigration concerns. Rates of volunteering, churchgoing, socializing, and helping others are used to predict anti-immigration sentiments. Panel survey data from Germany makes a dynamic 'conditional change' modeling strategy possible; lagged immigration views are included in models to reveal the predictors of over time developments. The most robust findings signal that frequent church attendance reduces immigration concerns; routinely helping others enhances them. And in both instances, these relationships are conditioned by the presence of immigrants in the residential area. Overall, the results position social participation in certain activities as important factors that shape people's views on immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of light emitting diodes (LEDs) in outdoor lighting has energy-saving potential, but users’ responses to this light source are largely unknown. An intervention study in two residential areas compared conventional lighting installations (high pressure sodium in Area 1 and high pressure mercury in Area 2) to a retrofitted LED-alternative regarding residents’ perceptions of quality of light, visual accessibility and danger. Moreover, energy use was calculated. Residents’ ( N = 60) visual accessibility improved and perceived danger remained low in both areas after retrofitting. In Area 2 the perceived quality of light increased, whereas in Area 1 the results were mixed. The retrofitted application reduced energy use by 41–76% and might be a feasible alternative to conventional outdoor lighting in relatively safe areas.

This paper uses the results of household travel surveys from the Osaka metropolitan area in Japan from 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 to explore how automobility progression was influenced by the characteristics of automobility cohorts, the age of individuals, the time period, and the residential area. In this paper, three measures are used to examine automobility: household car ownership, automobile modal share, and auto travel time. An age–period–cohort–residential area model is also developed to describe which effects significantly explain automobility characteristics. The results of a statistical analysis offer ample evidence that automobility cohorts do exist and, along with residential area and age, have a great impact on household car ownership and auto use.

The environmental impact of an extended property close source-separation system for solid household waste (i.e. a systems for collection of recyclables from domestic properties) is investigated in a residential area in southern Sweden. Since 2001, households have been able to source-separate waste into six fractions of dry recyclables and food waste sorting. The current system was evaluated using the EASEWASTE life cycle assessment tool. Current status is compared with an ideal scenario in which households display perfect source-separation behaviour and a scenario without any material recycling. Results show that current recycling provides substantial environmental benefits compared to a non-recycling alternative. The environmental benefit varies greatly between recyclable fractions, and the recyclables currently most frequently source-separated by households are often not the most beneficial from an environmental perspective. With optimal source-separation of all recyclables, the current net contribution to global warming could be changed to a net-avoidance while current avoidance of nutrient enrichment, acidification and photochemical ozone formation could be doubled. Sensitivity analyses show that thetype of energy substituted by incineration of non-recycled waste, as well as energy used in recycling processes and in the production of materials substituted by waste recycling, is of high relevance for the attained results.

Land-use allocation is a multiobjective optimization problem as it involves multiple stakeholders with conflicting goals and objectives. In this paper we optimize both land price and incompatibility among adjacent land uses of an area and try to solve the problem with a widely used heuristic approach called the genetic algorithm. The goal is to look for an effective, computationally easy, and efficient tool for land-use planners to use in generating and evaluating feasible land-use plans to facilitate the decision-making process. The model is demonstrated through a case study of the capital city of Bangladesh.

This multi-case study investigates characteristics and practices in schools that expand the traditional boundaries of school leadership and transform schools into democratic learning communities based on the level of implementation of the IDEALS framework. This investigation serves as a modus to illuminate democratic processes that change schools and address the needs of the students, not the needs of the adults in the system. A sample of five purposefully selected high schools, from the Midwest USA, was utilized. The schools serve Grade 9—12 students, but vary in size, residential area and socioeconomic status of the students. This study illuminates some of the challenges and strategies that facilitate or impede the process of creating more democratic schools that expand the boundaries of inquiry and discourse to include a broader range of community stakeholders and that respect and embrace issues of equity.

This article explores the variety of residential area types in the three largest Dutch cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. The data are characterised as multidimensional, as they pertain to socio-demographic and other `objective' indicators produced by official statistics, as well as to more `subjective' location preferences expressed by the residents themselves. The method used is a clustering and classification approach based on two-dimensional models generated by the self-organising map (SOM) and learning vector quantisation (LVQ). Using sub-district-level data, the study shows that, while some characteristic residential milieus can be found in all three cities, they have a broader variety in Amsterdam than in Rotterdam or The Hague. This supports the commonly held presumption that Amsterdam is less segregated than Rotterdam or The Hague in terms of intraurban housing patterns.

Minimising the impact of music practice and “Garage Band” performances upon neighbours in a residential area is challenging in terms of noise emissions from musical instruments, but particularly so when drums and percussion instruments are involved. Normal residential building façades and roofing designs offer limited low frequency noise attenuation and domestic building construction methods can severely compromise the performance of seemingly adequate partition construction details. This paper presents the results of design, construction and testing activities for a private drum studio that was required to meet stringent boundary noise emission targets in order to comply with local council Development Application requirements. High transmission loss lightweight partition test data is provided for the as-built final installation, along with details of cavity absorption, panel damping and vibration isolation treatments that contributed to maximising façade sound reduction performance. A range of room internal absorption treatments, including low frequency “tube traps”, corner traps and diffusers were successfully employed to achieve compliance with BBC recommended reverberation times for small recording studios

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between the availability of transportation infrastructure and services and the pattern of house prices in an urban area and to assess whether public investment in transportation can modify residential property values. This study was developed for the Lisbon, Portugal, metropolitan area (LMA) as part of a broader study that intends to develop new value-capture financing schemes for public transportation in the LMA. The paper focuses on three central municipalities in Portugal (Amadora, Lisbon, and Odivelas), where these effects could be more easily measured because of the existence of a significant variability of public transportation services. The paper tries to determine, with different spatial hedonic pricing models, the extent to which access to transportation infrastructure currently is capitalized into house prices and isolates the influence of three different transportation infrastructures: metro, rail, and road. The results suggest that the proximity to one or two metro lines leads to significant property value changes. Results further indicate that the classic hedonic price model (ordinary least-squares estimation) leads to similar coefficient values of the local accessibility dummy variables compared with the spatial lag model and thus provides a steady basis to forecast the property value changes derived from transportation investment for the study area in the absence of a significant property value database.

The decline of response rates in attitude surveys and the nonparticipation of residents are big issues in decision-making processes for transportation planning. The existence of individuals who do not state their opinions, the silent group, disrupts smooth consensus-building processes. It is often claimed that the silent group or so-called silent majority relies on policy makers or proposed plans. This research analyzes the silent group's character in a traffic calming project conducted in a residential area. To understand the silent group's level of awareness, attitude, and preference would help identify better ways of including them in planning processes in the future. Data obtained from questionnaire surveys were used for this analysis. Nonrespondents to the surveys were defined as the silent group. First, the difference of opinions between the silent group and the nonsilent group was investigated. The result showed that the silent group was less aware of the traffic situation in the area and did not easily agree with the proposed plans. Second, the reasons for the silent group's attitude were analyzed. The result suggested that the silent group members felt less danger on roads near their houses, so they do not recognize the traffic situation of the whole neighborhood as serious. Because of the lack of awareness, the group tended to refuse questionnaire surveys. Moreover, the logistic regression analysis concluded that the silent group was less involved with survey topics that dealt with specific traffic problems and countermeasures.

This study explores whether there is a relationship between police officers' race and a neighbourhood's racial composition on the latter's community policing experience. The paper analyses responses from in-depth interviews with police officers from the Residential Area Policing Programme (RAPP), a community policing programme carried out in four neighbourhoods in Cleveland, Ohio. The measurement of the officers' experiences with RAPP is based on four questions focusing on the officers' attitudes, perceptions and observations vis-à-vis the neighbourhood, the residents' reactions to the programme and to the officers, and the impact of the programme on the neighbourhood's crime rates. The results show that for RAPP there was no relationship between the officers' race and the neighbourhood's racial composition on the individual officer's positive or negative experience with RAPP. However, the results illustrated how officers as racial groups experienced RAPP differently. The results also conveyed in a preliminary way that male officers experienced RAPP differently from female officers. Further research on the interaction between a neighbourhood's racial composition and officer race within a community policing context is needed to establish generalisability as well as the effect of gender on the community policing experience.

This paper introduces a novel algorithm for delineating mutually exclusive service areas of shelters which have finite capabilities to accommodate residents who are unevenly distributed in space. Minimizing the travel cost and keeping spatial continuity with capability constraint are the convergent objectives of this algorithm. The algorithm partitions an entire residential area into a number of spatial units to handle the unevenness of demand, and employs a shift insertion mechanism to reduce travel cost and to improve the spatial continuity of service areas. A series of experiments and scenarios has been conducted for the city of Memphis, USA, to validate the proposed algorithm. Comparative experiments under different constraints show that the proposed algorithm is a feasible solution for delineating service areas. Various application circumstances (for example, travel-cost calculation methods and the granularity of available demographic data) are discussed to evaluate the algorithm's feasibility. The proposed algorithm can be applied not only to delineating service areas of existing shelters but also to optimizing location allocation of new shelters or other facilities with similar characteristics.

This paper investigates the equity and efficiency of pricing strategies in a bimodal transport network with elastic demand and heterogeneous users on the basis of logit-based discrete choice models. The network consists of a railway line and a parallel highway with a bottleneck that provide daily commuting services between a residential area and a workplace. On the basis of two user groups differing in values of time, first-best pricing is shown to remain possible through the use of anonymous charges under the stochastic user equilibrium condition. Second-best pricing is also examined, in which an equity constraint is introduced to ensure that some users, if not all, are at least not worse off from implementing the pricing at expectation level. The efficiency, equity, demand realization, and modal split resulting from various pricing strategies are investigated and numerically validated in a simplified real network connecting the Kowloon urban area to Hong Kong, China, International Airport. It was found that the equity-constrained second-best pricing can result in a win-win situation for society and users. The efficiency and welfare gains depend heavily on the values of time of user groups and the number of users in each group.

Over the last few decades new residential developments have increasingly featured private roads. Many planned unit developments and new-urbanism-style projects have turned to private roads. This paper considers some of the spatial, socioeconomic, and planning implications created by private roads in the Canadian context. While private streets provide a useful tool for achieving design and density objectives, and for transferring the burden of development costs to those who benefit from growth, they exacerbate social segregation and spatial fragmentation of the urban landscape.

Auto ownership is a critical mediating link in the connection between the built environment and travel behavior: the built environment presumably influences auto ownership, which in turn impacts travel behavior. However, the way in which individual elements of the built environment affect auto ownership choices is far from understood. Further, residential self-selection may confound the interaction between the built environment and auto ownership. And the absence of panel data impedes our understanding of the causal relationships. Using a survey of 1682 respondents in Northern California, this study applied ordered probit and static-score modeling techniques to investigate the causal link from the built environment to auto ownership in both cross-sectional and quasi-panel contexts. Through variable selection in cross-sectional analysis, we found that individuals’ attitudes regarding residential neighborhood and travel are more strongly associated with their auto ownership decision than is the built environment per se. Specifically, when general preferences for various neighborhood traits were allowed to enter the model, they drove out from the model the (perceived) measure of the same trait for the neighborhood of current residence, a pattern suggesting that the observed correlation between neighborhood characteristics and auto ownership is primarily a result of self-selection. On the other hand, the quasi-panel results indicate that some built environment elements such as outdoor spaciousness and mixed land use are causes of auto ownership (remaining even after attitudes were allowed to enter the model), but their effects are marginal. In contrast, the strong influence of socio-demographics suggests that households’ auto ownership decisions are fundamentally based on their mobility needs and purchasing power. Given the mixed findings, this study does not definitively confirm a causal relationship between the built environment and auto ownership. However, it provides encouraging evidence that land-use policies designed to reduce auto ownership and use will lead to a marginal reduction in auto ownership.

Biological carbon monoxide (CO) monitoring is a direct approach to assess CO exposure and associated potential health impacts. Exhaled breath CO concentrations and corresponding carboxyhaemoglobin (COHb) level of car occupants were measured before and after 45-min in-vehicle commutes along a congested road in a typical commercial/residential area using various ventilation modes. The effects of longer commutes were examined by fitting the measured in-vehicle mean CO levels with the Peterson and Stewart model for COHb level prediction. The increase in COHb level after a trip varied from 0 to 57% for a non-smoker passenger. Predicted COHb levels indicate that potential health outcomes can be manifested for trips lasting more than 70 min and characterized with low in-vehicle air exchange.

Interest in neighbourhood effects has been increasing. This article is a contribution to the field, directed towards the entire areas of three municipalities in Sweden, not only their distressed areas, and to their total population with data from the Statistics Sweden register. The aim of the study is to analyse the significance of surroundings to an individual's socioeconomic career in the form of education, occupational status and income. Guided by a theoretical framework of social justice, the study proposes places of good fortune and places of few opportunities. The survey cohort is individuals born in 1970, who lived at least 5 years in the same area during their adolescence. Their careers are analysed 10 years later, in 1995. The most important finding is that the socio-demographic and physical context of the residential area of adolescence affects the subsequent socioeconomic career.

To what extent does the evolution of 20th-century residential area planning and development reflect the profound changes that have affected society over this period? How much was this evolution shaped by successive planning models formulated over the last century? The paper reports on an analysis of the land-use patterns of four neighbourhoods developed at different times over the 20th century. Data originate from field surveys and a systematic measurement of the land uses of the study areas. Findings paint a mixed picture. They show that some societal changes (rising affluence for example) have affected neighbourhood morphology, whereas others (such as cultural diversification) have left few traces. A comparison of different land-use features identifies both the advantages and downsides of each neighbourhood's morphology. It becomes difficult in this light to perceive the evolution of neighbourhood planning as a linear progression towards improved land-use efficiency and quality of life.

Research on neighborhoods is dominated by a focus on the social aspects of neighborhood life. The ability of neighborhoods to function as service providers is a critical and understudied aspect of neighborhood research. This paper offers a methodological contribution of the analysis of neighborhoods as service providers. Provision of services is defined in terms of accessibility, or the spatial proximities between residents and the facilities. Because the focus is on neighborhoods, access is defined on the basis of the pedestrian rather than the automobile. In addition, the needs of the neighborhood population are considered. A case study of Portland, Oregon, is used to demonstrate how an evaluation of pedestrian access could be conducted at the neighborhood scale.

In this study, the authors investigated wildlife value orientations, gender, and concern about risks posed by a large, potentially dangerous predator—the mountain lion. A survey (58% response rate) was used to collect data from a random sample of adult residents ( N = 2,469) in Colorado metropolitan areas. Both gender and parental role predicted concern about being attacked. Women expressed greater concern than men, and participants with children living at home expressed greater concern than participants without children at home. Participants with utilitarian values were more likely than those with protectionist ones to accept destroying a lion in a residential area, and men were more likely than women to accept destroying it. Additional research is needed to understand why women perceived more risk from a mountain lion but were less willing to accept destroying it, as well as to understand the relationships among gender, parental role, and environmental risk concern.

An ongoing topic of interest in urban transportation engineering is the impact of changes in road network capacity on the amount of vehicle travel in an urban area. In many cases, the debate focuses on potential increases in vehicle travel that occur with increases in road capacity—the phenomenon of “induced demand.” Some studies have also looked at the effects of reductions in roadway capacity and found that, in many of these cases, reductions in vehicle travel occur, generally confirming that a relationship exists between roadway capacity and vehicle travel. Additional information is provided on this subject in a North American context. The city of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, is a major urban center with a population of over 850,000 and a downtown employment of over 100,000. Centre Street Bridge is a major road bridge across the Bow River that connects downtown Calgary to the residential area in the northern part of the city. The bridge carries over 34,000 vehicles per day, with heavy peak-period flows. In August 1999, the Centre Street Bridge was closed to car and truck traffic for 14 months for major repairs. A detailed study was undertaken of changes in traffic and in transit and pedestrian flows that took place in weekday travel patterns during the closure. This included both analysis of observed count data before and during the closure and an interview survey with over 1,300 car users of the Centre Street Bridge and the other bridges serving the north side of the downtown. The major findings of this study are summarized here. Particular emphasis is placed on explaining what happened to the vehicle trips that used the bridge before the closure.

Most studies of ethnic segregation in cities use relative measures to create residential area classifications. We argue that absolute measures are better suited to testing theories of spatial separation, and introduce a classification procedure which provides a robust approach to comparative studies, directly linked to the homogeneity – heterogeneity continuum which underpins all studies of segregation. The procedure is illustrated by analyses of the five main ethnic groups in each of the largest cities of Australia, New Zealand, and the USA (Sydney, Auckland, and New York). There are substantial differences among those cities in their ethnic residential patterns, to the extent that these can be clearly established given the other difficulties in cross-national comparative studies (data comparability and the spatial scale of the data units): New York is segmented, Sydney is integrated, and Auckland occupies an intermediate position.

Imagining urban space as being comfortable or fearful is studied as an effect of people's connections to their residential area communication infrastructure. Geographic Information System (GIS) modeling and spatial-statistical methods are used to process 215 mental maps obtained from respondents to a multilingual survey of seven ethnically marked residential communities of Los Angeles. Spatial-statistical analyses reveal that fear perceptions of Los Angeles urban space are not associated with commonly expected causes of fear, such as high crime victimization likelihood. The main source of discomfort seems to be presence of non-White and non-Asian populations. Respondents more strongly connected to television and interpersonal communication channels are relatively more fearful of these populations than those less strongly connected. Theoretical, methodological, and community-building policy implications are discussed.

This article develops and tests a communication infrastructure model of belonging among dwellers of urban residential environments. The concept of a communication infrastructure—a storytelling system set in its communication action context—is discussed. Storytelling neighborhood, the communication process through which neighborhood discussion transforms people from occupants of a house to members of a neighborhood, is proposed as an essential component of people's paths to belonging, an attachment to a residential area that is evidenced in everyday exchange behaviors. A multimethod research design is employed to study seven residential areas in Los Angeles through the use of multilingual data collection to discover the relevant factors that determine belonging in new and old immigrant communities. A communication infrastructure model that posits storytelling as an intervening process between structural location and belonging is proposed and tested. Overall, the most important factor in creating belonging was found to be an active and integrated storytelling system that involves residents, community organizations, and local media. The diagnostic potentials of the communication infrastructure approach and the policy implications of the findings are discussed.

Women who have been on public assistance need to obtain and maintain steady employment because they stand to lose their public benefits and also because it is the only way out of poverty. Although the sociodemographic and general economic influences on job retention have been examined in the literature, the effects of transportation and of place of residence in a metropolitan area vis-à-vis entry-level job locations have not been studied systematically. Four sets of factors—transportation, location, sociodemographic, and family effects—are examined for their effect on job retention. In particular, it was found that employment security for female welfare clients or former clients does not come from job retention (i.e., tenure with the same employer) but from “employment retention” (i.e., jobs with different employers, possibly with a trend toward upward mobility). The effects of transportation and location on job and employment retention are complex. Although access to a vehicle is important for increasing employment retention, even more important is the number of job opportunities accessible by private vehicle or public transit within a tolerable travel time. Female welfare clients who retain a job longer and hold more jobs within a 2-year period are more likely to live in subareas of the metropolitan area with greater access to jobs within reasonable travel times; the competition for those jobs from other low-income individuals is low. Furthermore, female welfare clients with a high school diploma, when given the appropriate accessibility and location opportunities, enjoy increased job retention.

The influence of socioeconomic and demographic variables on environmentally responsible behaviors is examined. Analysis of data compiled by Statistics Canada from 43,000 households indicates that socioeconomic and demographic variables play an important role as antecedents to such behaviors. The results show that size of residential area, type of dwelling, education, and income are significant determinants of whether recycling facilities are available and used. Furthermore, having convenient access to a recycling program mediates the relationship between socioeconomic factors and recycling practice. Analyses also show that environmental behaviors are structured around specific environmental issues such as water, energy, or waste disposal and suggest that recycling may operate as a first step toward the adoption of other behaviors. The implications of these results for activists and policy makers are highlighted.

The globalization literature on New York and other metropolises has focused mainly on control centers of the world system, typically located in central business districts, edge cities, transportation hubs, technology parks, and exclusive residential areas. The remainder of the metropolis is often depicted as just a source of labor power and consumers. Taking the case of CB-Six, a bureaucratically defined locality and low-income residential area in the Bronx, this article reviews the global dimensions of local history in the outer boroughs of New York City. Local and global issues are tightly interwoven through the changing numbers and origins of immigrants and through the impact of world wars, economic crises, and restructuring. The locality affects the world through its real and fictional roles in popular entertainment and through the missions of Fordham University, the Bronx Zoo, the Botanical Garden, and such bygone institutions as the Home for Incurables and the Starlight Amusement Park. Glory or notoriety could have resulted from silent movies, political assassination, soap opera, mass murder, or music and movie stars, but CB-Six never reached the Hall of Fame!

The improvement of traffic environments is usually a matter of great concern to citizens in densely populated districts. In facilitating improvement projects in a street environment, it is important to enable the residents to have a better understanding of the ideas underlying the proposed plan and design. A computer-aided visual simulation system, LANDSCAD (landscape computer-aided design), has been developed on personal computers. A case study has been carried out in a residential district in a suburban city on the outskirts of Tokyo, where residents are trying to develop a plan for calming the traffic environment of streets in their neighborhood. The residents were provided with design alternatives shown on a video monitor, which were produced using LANDSCAD, and the effectiveness of LANDSCAD on the decision making process was observed. Through a paired-comparison test and investigations into the effect the uses of LANDSCAD has on the residents' preference about the design concepts, the effectiveness of this support system has been evaluated. (A)

Neighborhood businesses are essential to the social and economic viability of a community. Research on the effects of crime, fear of crime, and physical and social disorders has focused primarily on the residential area and has ignored the neighborhood business area. This note presents an argument for further research to redress this imbalance and offers survey results from one neighborhood business area that suggest that crime, fear, and disorders are perceived by small business proprietors and landowners to be serious problems. Results indicate that victimization is frequent and has negative financial and operational effects on business.

The framework developed in this paper describes the interactions among the components models in the integrated transportation and land-use package, ITLUP, developed by Putman. A partial solution for employment and residential location patterns can be found with matrix inversion. The existence, uniqueness, and positivity of these solutions is demonstrated. The interactions between the location models are interpreted as a special type of multiplier effect. Also, in the analysis several new functionally equivalent ITLUP algorithms are identified.

Spatial variations in the price of chemists' goods in Dublin are examined for a number of different baskets of products and for two time periods, so as to tackle the problem of the ‘sample of one’. A number of hypotheses including measures of store size, proximity of competition, and the type of residential area in which the shop is located are examined by means of bivariate and multiple correlation in relation to price variations, and in general the results are consistent for different baskets at a single time period: shops which are expensive for one combination of products tend to be expensive for most product combinations. However, there is little consistency of results between the two time periods, and this must create problems for price-motivated consumers: an inexpensive shop at one time period may not necessarily be inexpensive at a subsequent time period even for the same products. Even so, there is some temporal consistency in that the size of shop generally has a direct relationship with variations in prices, smaller shops being the more expensive.

The measurement of accessibility and travel patterns in urban areas is described. The methodology presented includes graphical measures of physical accessibility, a numerical index of accessibility that is consistent with graphical measures, residents' accessibility weighted by transport availability, and the relationship between accessibility and travel behaviour. Some empirical results are presented for access and travel to male and female jobs in Sydney, with the use of data collected for the 1971 Census of Population and for the Sydney Area Transportation Study. The consequences of some alternative arrangements of land use and plans to improve public transport on residents' accessibility are investigated. It is argued that accessibility measures are a useful aid to planners and policymakers in the social evaluation of urban structure.

The reactions of different residents to the same level of noise have been assumed to vary depending upon their type of housing and tenure status. However, no empirical evidence has been presented to support this assumption. The analysis described in this paper tests the separate and joint effects of housing type and tenure on various reactions to road traffic noise, with the use of questionnaire data and noise measurements collected at residential sites near to major highways in the Toronto region of southern Ontario. The results show that neither housing type nor tenure has any consistent effect on residents' reactions to road traffic noise. The working assumption in the literature is therefore not supported. Two important conclusions follow from this: first, that no one type of housing is clearly more appropriate in residential areas near to major highways; and second, that a policy of setting different noise standards for different types of residential area cannot be supported.