It is a great pleasure for me to attend the Fourth Annual Forum on City Informatization in the Asian-Pacific Region while having this opportunity to exchange views with the distinguished guests. IT Promotes Development, the theme of the annual forum which fully reveals the significance of sustainable development of informatization and its role in the development. This is a theme which attracts ...

Cities are potentially stressful environments for birds for numerous reasons, including their high volumes of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Native birds inhabiting cities tolerate such human disturbance, but may still potentially incur some cost that is reflected in body condition and the level of chronic stress experienced, unless they are inherently relatively insensitive to urban stresso...

Data from the urban renewal experience in Syracuse, New York are used to examine the impact of race on patterns of intra-urban migration. The results show that, overall, the migration patterns exhibited an exponential decay in frequency with increasing distance. Both blacks and whites display this pattern, but blacks tend to cluster more closely around the point of origin. Indirect evidence is ...

Background/Purpose: Obesity and secondary conditions continue to disproportionally affect the health of children living in urban areas. Studies show that a lack of resources and physical activity-unfriendly communities discourage 60 minutes of daily activity, including strengthening exercises, as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Using Social Ecological theory, the ...

BACKGROUND Low-income urban working mothers face many challenges in their domestic, environmental, and working conditions that may affect their mental health. In India, a high prevalence of mental health disorders has been recorded in young women, but there has been little research to examine the factors that affect their mental health at home and work. METHODS Through a primarily qualitative...

Urban habitats are characterized by high levels of disturbance, impervious paving, and heat retention. These factors, acting in concert, alter soil, water, and air conditions in ways that promote the growth of stress-tolerant, earlysuccessional vegetation on abandoned or unmaintained land. In most urban areas, a cosmopolitan array of spontaneous plants provide important ecological services that...

Introduction Urban street design has a strong influence on human thermal bioclimate. Especially shading and ground coverage show great impact (Lin et al 2010 a, b). Thus, if the design of a popular urban place is changed, human thermal bioclimate on the place may be seriously affected. Facing the impact of global climate change especially heat stress should be reduced (Matzarakis and Endler 201...

Analysing the urban renewal of Boston’sWest End during the 1950s, we examine how psychiatrists, social scientists and urban planners understood the relationship between the urban environment and mental health. For psychiatrist Erich Lindemann, the West End offered a unique opportunity to study how acute stress and loss affected populations, thus contributing to social psychiatry, which sought t...