In regards to “suburb,” many Americans have strong cultural ideas of what constitutes a “suburb.” The typical image includes post-World War II tract housing built for car-owning families, cul de sacs, and shopping malls. Yet, suburbs are actually extremely heterogeneous in their demographic composition, economy, and land use patterns; most bear little resemblance to these stereotypical images. ...

The upper layer of forest soils (0-20 cm depth) were collected from urban, suburban, and rural areas in the Pearl River Delta of Southern China to estimate the distribution and the possible sources of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Total concentrations of PAHs in the forest soils decreased significantly along the urban-suburban-rural gradient, indicating the influence of anthropogenic...

Suburban areas are subject to strong anthropogenic modifications, which can influence hydrological processes. Sewer systems, ditches, sewer overflow devices and retention basins are introduced and large surface areas are sealed off. The knowledge of accurate flow paths and watershed boundaries in these suburban areas is important for storm water management, hydrological modelling and hydrologic...

The urban environment quality is of vital importance as the majority of people now live in cities. Due to the continuous urbanisation and industrialisation in many parts of the world, metals are continuously emitted into the terrestrial environment and pose a great threat on human health. An extensive survey was conducted in the highly urbanised and commercialised Hong Kong Island area (80.3 km...

OBJECTIVE To assess the operational effectiveness of long-lasting insecticide treated materials (ITMs), when used at household level, for the control of Aedes aegypti in moderately infested urban and suburban areas. METHODS In an intervention study, ITMs consisting of curtains and water jar-covers (made from PermaNet) were distributed under routine field conditions in 10 clusters (5 urban and...

Very high resolution satellite images are used to derive the spatial distributions of landscape ecological metrics within suburban areas. These indicators are weighted mean patch size and lacunarity computed from thresholded normalized difference vegetation index obtained from multispectral IKONOS-2 imagery. Spatial distributions of the metrics are derived for an extensive suburban area on the ...

The objective of this study is to investigate the consistency of “suburban” population densities and land covers. We analyzed population density, extracted from the census, and vegetation abundance, derived from Landsat imagery, taking six cities in the U.S.A. as contrasting examples. Combining population density and areal vegetation abundance estimates yields univariate and bivariate distribut...

The author contends that healthy communities must be both environmentally and socially sustainable, given that health depends on the quality of the built and natural environments, and that global change resulting from the industrial economy is affecting the web of life. He argues that suburban sprawl wastes scarce resources and disproportionately places those resources in the hands of suburban ...

Hedonic pricing has been used to identify values of nonmarket natural resource amenities. Most of these studies have been completed in suburban or urban communities rather than rural areas. The hedonic pricing study presented here includes developed residential parcel transactions occurring in a rural county in Michigan. We develop two hedonic pricing models using transaction data for two rural...