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The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the food insecurity issue across the nation, especially for vulnerable population groups. As an important way to access food, online grocery shopping has gained substantial popularity during COVID-19. However, it is not clear how COVID-19 impacted both the in-store and online grocery shopping simultaneously and how the impacts varied among different population groups. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the impacts of COVID-19 on food access, we conducted two rounds of online survey during the initial and middle stages of COVID-19 in Maricopa County, Arizona, United States. In addition to the factors that have been examined in the literature, we examined how travel behavior, food environment, and lifestyle change affected both in-store and online shopping during COVID-19 when compared with before COVID-19. Analysis results suggest that the methods people used for grocery shopping varied with different stages of COVID-19 and among different population groups. Changes of people's daily life and travel behavior during COVID-19 are found to be associated with people's grocery shopping method selection. While people with better food environment were more likely to keep in-store grocery shopping, as the pandemic progressed, food environment became less important as a factor influencing the adoption of online grocery shopping. Food assistance program participants had a higher demand for the online grocery shopping service. However, the barriers associated with redeeming their benefits online prohibited them from becoming new online grocery shoppers during COVID-19. The study provides important insights into planning of food provision and formulating effective intervention strategies during future shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fundamental basis for territorial political representation is the presumption that people share greater common interests with others in closer geographic proximity than with people farther away. This principle is found in U.S. legal requirements that districts for the House of Representatives and state legislatures should not needlessly divide "communities of interest" and should be "reasonably compact." We propose a new objective standard to evaluate spatial fairness of redistricting plans: the extent to which a delineation minimizes total distance between all pairs of people assigned to the same district. To date, the legal standard of compactness has primarily been thought of in terms of the shapes of political districts, but boundary shape may have little correspondence with how populations are actually clustered and dispersed. Inter‐person separation, by contrast, provides a direct, intuitive metric for evaluating the congruence of districting plans with the territorial basis of political representation. To operationalize an inter‐person separation standard, we propose a model and present a heuristic method for delineating comparator districting schemes. We apply the standard to the current U.S. Congressional Districts in the states of Arizona and North Carolina to demonstrate how inter‐person separation could be used to develop and vet future redistricting plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Optimizing community gardens could ensure equal access to food and cooling benefits during urban sprawl. • Compared to ad-hoc planning, optimization systematically identifies the optimal number and locations of gardens. • In warm/hot arid climates, more gardens are needed to mitigate urban heat than food-desert. • Food-desert or heat mitigation alone cannot optimize either's challenge. • Tradeoffs between the two are critical, especially when a small number of gardens are sited. Urban community gardens can reduce food insecurity and serve as green spaces alleviating extreme temperatures. Such co-benefit synergy may prove especially significant for arid-land metropolises. Despite these synergistic roles, planning for community gardens is largely undertaken in an ad-hoc manner. To date, few studies have addressed the full potential (co-benefits) of developing urban vacant land into community garden-green spaces. We addressed this in a spatially-optimized way, developing a model seeking to mitigate food desert and urban heat, and applied it to the fast sprawling Phoenix metro-area, Arizona (USA). Examining more than 5,000 vacant parcels for potential garden-green spaces, we found that the optimal number and locations of community gardens needed for different mitigation goals can vary significantly. In the Phoenix metro-area, the gardens required for extreme heat mitigation is about twice the number for food desert mitigation because high-temperature areas are more prevalent and expansive in semi-arid desert environment compared to the relatively small number low income, food desert areas. Furthermore, we found that the existing 76 community gardens were mostly clustered around urban cores, leaving two-thirds of the metro-area underserved. If sited in a spatially-optimized way, the co-benefits gained from the 76 gardens could be doubled, and covering more high-need neighborhoods. Integrating fine-scale vacant parcel data, our model identified high potential community garden-greening sites in priority neighborhoods with a precision not capable in conventional planning methods. Our findings demonstrate that spatially-optimized planning is of particular importance to avoid clustering of community gardens and ensure more equal access to local food and outdoor cooling benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an emerging technology, wireless communication revolutionizes the way data are shared and transferred. In particular, wireless mesh network (WMN) technology allows data transmission from one node to another without extensive cabling. In this article, spatial characteristics of maximal covering problems are explored, and a novel spatial optimization model is proposed for WMN topology planning. The model selects the optimal locations for network infrastructure to achieve the maximal coverage of spatial demand. Additionally, important WMN design requirements have been accounted for, including network topology and throughput capacity. The validity of the model is tested through a WMN deployment developed for an emergency medical service application in Tucson, Arizona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]