extended abstract 1. introduction earthquake is one of the most important factors in vulnerability of rural areas in iran, which particularly due to shallow epicenter, causes a lot of damage. in addition to the absolute and relative position of different parts of the country, rupture of spatial organization and the lack of hierarchy based on interactive relationship among settlements, are ackno...

The Ejisu-Juaben Health Insurance Scheme (EJHIS), a municipal health insurance scheme in the Asante Region, provides insurance cards to subscribers in the municipality to access affordable health care from accredited health facilities. The study was carried out to find out the extent to which health care is accessible and affordable to the people and to determine the sustainability of the schem...

Informal settlement in Kabul Why and how should Kabul upgrade its informal settlements? Informal settlements shelter about 80% of Kabul’s population (2.44 million people), cover 69% of the city’s residential land, and represent a fixed private capital investment of US$2.5 billion (not including land value). The size, scale, and contribution to the economy of informal settlements force the poli...

abstract: today, informal settlements have been accepted in the cities and towns as a problem and an urban fact facing urban and regional management in different countries of the world. according to past experiences and the evolutions of today, searching for new and efficient solutions in order to improve the quality of these settlements in line with converting them into a habitable zone of urb...

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that virtual communities can be traced in the online ‘tells’ retained by popular virtual settlements like Facebook and Twitter. In this article, the authors push this line of research toward an analysis of pre-requisites and constrains of virtual settlements that determine the understanding of community life across settlements. The approach followed is ground...

BACKGROUND This paper considers the question of dietary diversity as a proxy for nutrition insecurity in communities living in the inner city and the urban informal periphery in Johannesburg. It argues that the issue of nutrition insecurity demands urgent and immediate attention by policy makers. METHODS A cross-sectional survey was undertaken for households from urban informal (n = 195) and ...

Like most cities in developing countries, Kigali is experiencing rapid urbanisation leading to an increase in the urban population and rapid growth in the size and number of informal settlements. More than 60% of the city's population resides in these settlements, where they experience inadequate and poor quality urban services including sanitation. This article discusses the issues and constra...

Brazil has presided over the most comprehensive agrarian reform frontier colonization program on Earth, in which ~1.2 million settlers have been translocated by successive governments since the 1970's, mostly into forested hinterlands of Brazilian Amazonia. These settlements encompass 5.3% of this ~5 million km2 region, but have contributed with 13.5% of all land conversion into agropastoral la...

Understanding the spatial point pattern of human settlements and their geographical associations are important for understanding the drivers of land use and land cover change and the relationship between environmental and ecological processes on one hand and cultures and lifestyles on the other. In this study, a Geographic Information System (GIS) approach, Ripley's K function and Monte Carlo s...

The archaeology of slave settlements is a recent development within historical archaeology but has gained substantial headway during the last few years. Most of the excavations have been in coastal areas of the Southeastern United States, principally in Georgia and South Carolina. Substantive questions about housing, diet, and lifestyle have been examined. Some comparison between planters. over...