Background & Aims: Studying about background radiation is important because human beings are continuously exposed to these radiations which leave energy in tissues and the transferred energy leads to undesirable biologic effects. The level of background radiation differs in indoor and outdoor places. Since, people spend more time indoors, in this research environmental gamma dose rate for indoo...

Identity has been a major factor in establishing and maintaining traditional forms of dwellings and settlements. Today this connection between people and place has been fragmented because of social, economic and technological forces. An examination of the hill town of Giove in 1987 revealed how twentieth century people can identify with places built long ago. The author's "reading" of Giove and...

Ethnically diverse urban areas are often strongly influenced by the medium and long-term demographic consequences of immigration. Hypotheses regarding the population, housing and social changes following immigration are here set out in a dynamic paradigm. These are tested using a time series of census data for Oldham and Rochdale. The results show how natural growth generates dispersal of immig...

Mayan towns in the Guatemalan highlands hold markets on specific days of the week. A market is attended by local townspeople, by peasants residing in the town’s hinterland, and by vendors bringing wares from other towns. A market functions to bring in goods from other ecological zones, to bring in goods from higher order centers, and to sell surpluses of locally produced goods. To understand ho...

Historians face many difficulties when plumbing the depths of the very dynamic and heterogenic population structures of pre-modern towns, especially because very few sources encompass the various layers of the urban population. In this paper I argue that it is necessary to collect and unlock larger amounts of data in databases, which in turn allow to compose multi-facetted biographies of townsp...

According to their self-representations, western European guilds in the early modern period (1500–1800) were archetypal patriarchal institutions. In cities and towns where they existed, the vast majority of guilds restricted their membership to men. Corporate statutes not only prohibited women from becoming mistresses, they also prevented them from entering apprenticeship or even taking employm...

During the 1940s a series of remarkable and radical planning documents were produced for many British cities, generally now collectively referred to as ‘reconstruction plans’. Universally these sought to introduce a highly interventionist, comprehensive planning, often with strong elements of ‘clean sweep’ reconstruction. This article considers two such plans, for the historic cities of Durham ...

The January 2001 earthquake that struck the state of Gujarat in India damaged or destroyed some 8,000 villages and 490 towns. In the months and years after the earthquake, many organizations undertook widespread reconstruction programmes. One such collaboration between the NGO CARE India and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) built 5,554 permanent houses as well ...