Search

Land use planning as strategic instruments to guide urban dynamics faces particular challenges in the Global South, including Sub-Saharan Africa, where urgent interventions are required to improve urban and environmental sustainability. This study investigated and identified key challenges of land use planning and its environmental assessments to improve the urban and environmental sustainability of city-regions. In doing so, we combined expert interviews and questionnaires with spatial analyses of urban and regional land use plans, as well as current and future urban land cover maps derived from Geographic Information Systems and remote sensing. By overlaying and contrasting land use plans and land cover maps, we investigated spatial inconsistencies between urban and regional plans and the associated urban land dynamics and used expert surveys to identify the causes of such inconsistencies. We furthermore identified and interrogated key challenges facing land use planning, including its environmental assessment procedures, and explored means for overcoming these barriers to rapid, yet environmentally sound urban growth. The results illuminated multiple inconsistencies (e.g., spatial conflicts) between urban and regional plans, most prominently stemming from conflicts in administrative boundaries and a lack of interdepartmental coordination. Key findings identified a lack of Strategic Environmental Assessment and inadequate implementation of land use plans caused by e.g., insufficient funding, lack of political will, political interference, corruption as challenges facing land use planning strategies for urban and environmental sustainability. The baseline information provided in this study is crucial to improve strategic planning and urban/environmental sustainability of city-regions in Sub-Saharan Africa and across the Global South, where land use planning faces similar challenges to address haphazard urban expansion patterns.

GIS-based multicriteria evaluation (MCE) provides a framework for analysing complex decision problems by quantifying variables of interest to score potential locations according to their suitability. In the context of earthquake preparedness and post-disaster response, MCE has relied mainly on uninformed or non-expert stakeholders to identify high-risk zones, prioritise areas for response, or highlight vulnerable populations. In this study, we compare uninformed, informed non-expert, and expert stakeholders’ responses in MCE modelling for earthquake response planning in Vancouver, Canada. Using medium- to low-complexity MCE models, we highlight similarities and differences in the importance of infrastructural and socioeconomic variables, emergency services, and liquefaction potential between a non-weighted MCE, a medium-complexity informed non-expert MCE, and a low-complexity MCE informed by 35 local earthquake planning and response experts from governmental and non-governmental organisations. Differences in the observed results underscore the importance of accessible, expert-informed approaches for prioritising locations for earthquake response planning and for the efficient and geographically precise allocation of resources., Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (1041)

High-risk cancer resection surgeries are increasingly being performed at fewer, more specialised, and higher-volume institutions across Canada. The resulting increase in travel time for patients to obtain treatment may be exacerbated by socioeconomic barriers to access. Focussing on five high-risk surgery types (oesophageal, ovarian/fallopian, liver, lung, and pancreatic cancers), this study examines socioeconomic trends in age-adjusted resection rates and travel time to surgery location for urban, suburban, and rural populations across Canada, excluding Québec, from 2004 to 2012. Significant differences in age-adjusted resection rates were observed between urban (14.9 per 100 000 person-years [95% CI: 12.2, 17.6]), suburban (40.7 [40.1, 41.2]), and rural (32.7 [29.6, 35.9]) populations, with higher rates in suburban and rural areas throughout the study period for all cancer types. Resection rates did not differ between the highest (Q1) and lowest (Q5) socioeconomic strata (Q1: 13.3 [12.2, 14.4]; Q5: 12.0 [10.7, 13.4]), with significantly higher rates among middle-SES patients (Q2: 27.3 [25.6, 29.0]; Q3: 39.6 [37.4, 41.8]; Q4: 37.5 [35.3, 39.7]). Travel times to treatment were consistently higher among the most socioeconomically deprived patients, most notably in suburban and rural areas. The results suggest that the conventional inclusion of suburbs with urban areas in health research may obfuscate important trends for public health policy and programmes.

Additional file 1.

This Highlight Report provides findings on patterns of residential care (RC) and assisted living (AL) utilization in Burnaby, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Richmond, Surrey, Vancouver, and White Rock among persons of East Asian (EA) (defined as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino) and non-EA ethnic backgrounds. South Asians were not included in this ethnic grouping due to different cultural service needs. The findings in this report are based on GIS (geographic information system) analyses of census data coupled with data on RC and AL facilities from several sources, including the Office of the Seniors Advocate of BC, the Assisted Living Registry, Health Authorities, and a survey covering 95% of all 111 publically funded facilities (66 RC and 45 AL) for seniors in the catchment area. These data are supplemented with thematic analyses drawn from four focus groups.

Epidemiological studies have traditionally categorised study populations as urban or rural. However, a growing proportion of the global population resides in spaces that are neither dense urban cores nor rural/remote regions. These interstices are distinctly suburban, featuring a low density of services, poor walkability, and spatial isolation relative to their urban counterparts. Contrary to the dominant imaginary of the affluent ‘American Dream’, Canada’s suburbs are increasingly becoming home to socioeconomically deprived populations. Following from the well-established links between socioeconomic status and health geographies, this dissertation presents quantitative geographical evidence that the suburbs differ from their urban and rural counterparts, constituting a third, epidemiologically distinct space. The first substantive chapter provides an introductory tracing of the suburb’s socioeconomic history, laying the contextual foundation for a distinct categorisation. The following three chapters then draw upon this categorisation to differentiate spatial epidemiological patterns of cancer along both urban/suburban/rural and socioeconomic axes. The second chapter uses exploratory temporal mapping to document a recent emergence of oral cancer cases in British Columbia’s suburbs, geographically coincident with immigration from betel quid-chewing regions and an increase in local socioeconomic deprivation. The third chapter then explores head and neck cancer patients’ spatial access to cancer treatment centres across the province, highlighting significantly greater travel times among the most deprived suburban and rural populations. The fourth chapter evaluates whether these spatial and socioeconomic disparities reflect actual treatment rates, focussing on resection surgeries for five cancer types across Canada, excluding Québec. Resection rates were positively associated with socioeconomic deprivation in rural areas and inversely associated in urban areas, while the highest overall rates were observed in middle-SES suburban populations. Drawing upon these three cancer studies, this dissertation proposes a suburban spatial epidemiology, in which suburbs are differentiated from urban and rural spaces. I conclude by asserting that the suburbs’ unique placial contexts merit standalone attention in health research, calling for further examination of suburban spaces in epidemiological research.

The World Health Organization has declared violence to be a significant public health problem (2002). This thesis uses a spatial epidemiology approach to investigate clusters of violent injury in the Metro Vancouver area.Trauma registry data were analysed using a visually-enhanced ranking method in geographic information systems to identify violent injury hotspots. The identified hotspots were then examined using environmental, spatial-temporal, victim, and deprivation variables. Data from hotspot observations, victim and incident records, and the use of a Vancouver-specific deprivation index were included.Alcohol availability, time of day, and social deprivation are several of the factors found to be strongly related to violent injury hotspots. However, the hotspots were found to occur in several disparate geographical contexts, each of which is characterised to produce a series of multidimensional profiles of urban spaces of violent injury. To conclude, the emergence of a non-statistical, exploratory paradigm in geographic information science is promoted.