Recent ucb_ced_cep_oapdeposits items

Community violence intervention: measuring risk & protective factors for gun use among program participants

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Community Violence Intervention (CVI) involves recruiting likely gun violence offenders using street outreach and offering mentorship, social services and other supports to discourage future firearm violence. Grounded in public health, CVI interventions identify an individual’s risk factors and work to enhance protective and buffering factors that can help prevent a client from offending. This paper reviews evaluations of CVI interventions to understand how participants’ risk factors are defined and measured. We used keywords to identify 38 published evaluations of 32 different CVI interventions that recruited community members and used street-outreach as the primary mode of engagement. We then used the PRISMA scoping review methodology to identify categories of risk and protective factors to screen each published evaluation for whether and how they measured participants’ risk, protective and buffering factors at program onset. We found that 56% (18/32) of evaluations included...

Health Equity in All Urban Policies: A Case Study of Richmond, California

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Local governments working in partnership with communities can institutionalize practices that promote health equity. We offer a case study of how one city in the US is implementing Health in All Policies (HiAP) with the explicit aim of promoting health equity. We use participant observations, original document reviews and interviews to describe how Richmond, California, is building new partnerships, programs and practices with community-based organizations and within government itself as part of the implementation of its HiAP Ordinance. We also report on indicators that were identified by community and government stakeholders for tracking progress toward improving place-based determinants of population health. We find that the responsibility for implementing Richmond's HiAP Ordinance rests on a new institution within local government and this entity is building new partnerships, promoting innovative policies and augmenting practices toward greater health equity. We also reveal...

Co-creating places for urban health & healing: the case of Pogo Park

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This case study explores how an urban, low-income, community in Richmond, California, came together to reclaim a local park, redesign and redevelop it, and the impacts that process and the new green space is having on local residents. The park is called Elm Playlot and the community group, Pogo Park. Methods used to generate the case study included original document review, participant observation, and interviews, as well as data from two community surveys and a youth photovoice project. The case study emphasizes that urban health promoting and healing physical and social transformations must be co-created, community leadership, ownership and economic benefits must be prioritized, and decade-long commitments from residents, local government and non-governmental organizations, not one alone, are necessary. We also found that redevelopment of Pogo Park contributed to significant reductions in self-reported fear of violence and improvements in community social connections, trust...

Correction: Evaluating advance peace in Fresno, California: An interrupted times series analysis of a community-based gun violence intervention

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0328780.].

Reviving public transit ridership to downtowns and employment centers: Case Studies of San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley, and Walnut Creek

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines transit ridership and its role in downtowns in five San Francisco Bay Area cities pre- and post-COVID. We analyze transit ridership data from 2019 and 2022-24, review transit agency responses to COVID’s consequences, and examine the plans and proposals for downtowns adopted by the cities and those developed by business improvement districts (BIDs). We draw upon focus groups we held with transit users and interviews we conducted with key stakeholders to gain additional information and insights. We found that trips to, from and within our five case study downtowns account for a significant share of overall regional transit ridership, a finding that underscores downtown transit’s importance to state and regional goals for greenhouse gas reduction, pollution abatement, economic prosperity, and equity and inclusion. For the five downtowns, transit ridership is on a path to recovery but as of early 2024 was still falling short of pre-COVID levels, leaving...

DeepAir: deep learning and satellite imagery to estimate high-resolution PM2.5 at scale

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Air pollution, specifically PM2.5, has become a significant global concern owing to its detrimental impacts on public health. Even so, the high-resolution monitoring of air pollution is still a challenge on a global scale. To cope with this, machine learning (ML) techniques have been utilized to infer the concentration of air pollutants at a fine scale. In this study, we propose DeepAir, a learning framework for estimating PM2.5 concentrations at a fine scale with sparsely distributed observations. DeepAir integrates a pre-trained convolutional neural network with the LightGBM method. This framework estimates the PM2.5 concentration of a given patch, utilizing a synergy of geographical information, meteorological conditions, and satellite observations. We select California as the focal region and train the model with data from 2014 to 2017 provided by 130 PM2.5 observation stations in the state. Upon training, the model can be applied to estimate the daily PM2.5 concentrations...

Evaluating advance peace in Fresno, California: An interrupted times series analysis of a community-based gun violence intervention

Sat, 6 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

BACKGROUND: Gun violence is a critical public health issue, contributing to the disproportionate burden of health inequities among racially and economically marginalized populations. Advance Peace, a community-driven gun reduction program that integrates street outreach workers to interrupt conflicts with trauma-informed programming to provide mentorship and support for young people at the center of urban gun violence, may be a strategy to reduce gun violence and build healthy communities. We assessed whether the implementation of Advance Peace in Fresno, California was associated with a reduction in gun-related violence, including homicides and assaults. We hypothesized that post-implementation of Advance Peace, there would be a reduction in both gun-related homicides and assaults. METHODS: Leveraging crime statistics from the Fresno Police Department on gun-related homicides and assaults between January 2014 and June 2023, we evaluated the impact of Advance Peace programming,...

Design in government: City planning, space-making, and urban politics

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years, design has appeared in an ever-broadening range of government processes and projects, particularly in cities. What has design become, such that its methods and practices could be applied to urban planning and public administration? And what are the governmental problems that design methods and designers are being mobilized to address? This article answers these questions by tracing the tangled intersections of design, city planning, and urban administration in the last century. Through a genealogical analysis, it shows how a number of designers came to redefine design as a set of procedures for formulating and proposing solutions to “wicked problems.” This understanding of design—which developed in fields such as industrial and product design that were remote from government—has recently gained salience in public administration and city planning. In contrast to an influential geographical analysis of design as spectacular architecture that is divorced from any...

The disaster contradiction of contemporary capitalism: Resilience, vital systems security, and ‘post-neoliberalism’

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The disaster contradiction of contemporary capitalism: Resilience, vital systems security, and ‘post-neoliberalism’

The post-global city: revisiting and reimagining the competitiveness and livability of primary central city centers

Fri, 7 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The post-global city: revisiting and reimagining the competitiveness and livability of primary central city centers

Fri, 7 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The post-global city: revisiting and reimagining the competitiveness and livability of primary central city centers

Urban Environments, Health, and Environmental Sustainability: Findings From the SALURBAL Study

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the relevance of cities and city policies for health, there has been limited examination of large numbers of cities aimed at characterizing urban health determinants and identifying effective policies. The relatively few comparative studies that exist include few cities in lower and middle income countries. The Salud Urbana en America Latina study (SALURBAL) was launched in 2017 to address this gap. The study has four aims: (1) to investigate social and physical environment factors associated with health differences across and within cities; (2) to document the health impact of urban policies and interventions; (3) to use systems approaches to better understand dynamics and identify opportunities for intervention and (4) to create a new dialogue about the drivers of health in cities and their policy implications and support action. Beyond these aims SALURBAL, has an overarching goal of supporting collaborative policy relevant research and capacity -building that engages...

Understanding congestion propagation by combining percolation theory with the macroscopic fundamental diagram

Mon, 13 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The science of cities aims to model urban phenomena as aggregate properties that are functions of a system’s variables. Following this line of research, this study seeks to combine two well-known approaches in network and transportation science: (i) The macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD), which examines the characteristics of urban traffic flow at the network level, including the relationship between flow, density, and speed. (ii) Percolation theory, which investigates the topological and dynamical aspects of complex networks, including traffic networks. Combining these two approaches, we find that the maximum number of congested clusters and the maximum MFD flow occur at the same moment, precluding network percolation (i.e. traffic collapse). These insights describe the transition of the average network flow from the uncongested phase to the congested phase in parallel with the percolation transition from sporadic congested links to a large, congested cluster of links. These...

A new commercial boundary dataset for metropolitan areas in the USA and Canada, built from open data

Mon, 6 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose of this study is to define the geographic boundaries of commercial areas by creating a consistent definition, combining various commercial area types, including downtowns, retail centres, financial districts, and other employment subcentres. Our research involved the collection of office, retail and job density data from 69 metropolitan regions across USA and Canada. Using this data, we conducted an unsupervised image segmentation model and clustering methods to identify distinctive commercial geographic boundaries. As a result, we identified 23,751 commercial areas, providing a detailed perspective on the commercial landscape of metropolitan areas in the USA and Canada. In addition, the generated boundaries were successfully validated through comparison with previously established commerce-related boundaries. The output of this study has implications for urban and regional planning and economic development, delivering valuable insights into the overall commercial...

Recent greening may curb urban warming in Latin American cities of better economic conditions

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Rising temperatures have profound impacts on the well-being of urban residents. However, factors explaining the temporal variability of urban thermal environment, or urban warming, remain insufficiently understood, especially in the Global South. Addressing this gap, we studied the relationship between city-level economic conditions and urban warming, and how urban green space mediated this relationship, focusing on 359 major Latin American cities between 2001 and 2022. While effect sizes varied by economic and temperature measures used, we found that better economic conditions were associated with lower baseline greenness in 2011, which contributed to faster warming. There was modest evidence that this faster warming associated with lower baseline greenness and improved economic conditions was partially offset by cooling from recent greening (2001-2022) in cities of better economic conditions. This offset was more evident in arid cities. Together, these findings provide insights...

Social drivers of vulnerability to wildfire disasters: A review of the literature

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The increase of wildfire disasters globally has highlighted the need to understand and mitigate human vulnerability to wildfire. In response, there has been a substantial uptick in efforts to characterize and quantify wildfire vulnerability. Such efforts have largely focused on quantifying potential wildfire exposure and frequently overlooked the individual and community vulnerability to wildfire. Here, we review the emergent literature on social vulnerability to wildfire by synthesizing factors related to exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity that contribute to a population’s or community’s overall vulnerability to wildfires. We identify how those factors subsequently affect an individual’s or community’s agency to enact change, and highlight that many of the current paradigms for reducing wildfire vulnerability fail to acknowledge and address the importance of inequalities that create differential vulnerability. We suggest that paying attention to the systems and conditions...

Greenness and excess deaths from heat in 323 Latin American cities: Do associations vary according to climate zone or green space configuration?

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Green vegetation may protect against heat-related death by improving thermal comfort. Few studies have investigated associations of green vegetation with heat-related mortality in Latin America or whether associations are modified by the spatial configuration of green vegetation. We used data from 323 Latin American cities and meta-regression models to estimate associations between city-level greenness, quantified using population-weighted normalized difference vegetation index values and modeled as three-level categorical terms, and excess deaths from heat (heat excess death fractions [heat EDFs]). Models were adjusted for city-level fine particulate matter concentration (PM_2.5), social environment, and country group. In addition to estimating overall associations, we derived estimates of association stratified by green space clustering by including an interaction term between a green space clustering measure (dichotomized at the median of the distribution) and the...

Health and Environmental Co-Benefits of City Urban Form in Latin America: An Ecological Study

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We investigated the association of urban landscape profiles with health and environmental outcomes, and whether those profiles are linked to environmental and health co-benefits. In this ecological study, we used data from 208 cities in 8 Latin American countries of the SALud URBana en América Latina (SALURBAL) project. Four urban landscape profiles were defined with metrics for the fragmentation, isolation, and shape of patches (contiguous area of urban development). Four environmental measures (lack of greenness, PM_2.5, NO₂, and carbon footprint), two cause-specific mortality rates (non-communicable diseases and unintentional injury mortality), and prevalence of three risk factors (hypertension, diabetes, and obesity) for adults were used as the main outcomes. We used linear regression models to evaluate the association of urban landscape profiles with environmental and health outcomes. In addition, we used finite mixture modeling to create co-benefit...

Scaling of mortality in 742 metropolitan areas of the Americas

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We explored how mortality scales with city population size using vital registration and population data from 742 cities in 10 Latin American countries and the United States. We found that more populated cities had lower mortality (sublinear scaling), driven by a sublinear pattern in U.S. cities, while Latin American cities had similar mortality across city sizes. Sexually transmitted infections and homicides showed higher rates in larger cities (superlinear scaling). Tuberculosis mortality behaved sublinearly in U.S. and Mexican cities and superlinearly in other Latin American cities. Other communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional deaths, and deaths due to noncommunicable diseases were generally sublinear in the United States and linear or superlinear in Latin America. Our findings reveal distinct patterns across the Americas, suggesting no universal relation between city size and mortality, pointing to the importance of understanding the processes that explain heterogeneity...

Associations of Urban Environment Features with Hypertension and Blood Pressure across 230 Latin American Cities

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

BACKGROUND: Features of the urban physical environment may be linked to the development of high blood pressure, a leading risk factor for global burden of disease. OBJECTIVES: We examined associations of urban physical environment features with hypertension and blood pressure measures in adults across 230 Latin American cities. METHODS: In this cross-sectional study we used health, social, and built environment data from the SALud URBana en América Latina (SALURBAL) project. The individual-level outcomes were hypertension and levels of systolic and diastolic blood pressure. The exposures were city and subcity built environment features, mass transit infrastructure, and green space. Odds ratios (ORs) and mean differences and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated using multilevel logistic and linear regression models, with single- and multiple-exposure models adjusted for individual-level age, sex, education, and subcity educational attainment. RESULTS: A total of 109,176...

Is self-reported park proximity associated with perceived social disorder? Findings from eleven cities in Latin America

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Parks and greenspaces can enhance personal health in various ways, including among others, through psychological restoration and improved well-being. However, under certain circumstances, parks may also have adverse effects by providing isolated and hidden spaces for non-normative and crime-related activities. This study uses a survey conducted by the Development Bank of Latin America in a cross-sectional representative sample of 7,110 respondents in eleven Latin-American cities. We examine associations between self-reported park proximity with perceived social disorder (drug use/sales, gangs, prostitution and assault and/or crime), and whether these associations are modified by neighborhood characteristics (informal neighborhoods, poor street-lighting, abandoned buildings, illegal dumping). High self-reported park proximity was associated with lower perceptions of social disorder, but these associations were no longer significant following adjustment for neighborhood characteristics....

City-Level Travel Time and Individual Dietary Consumption in Latin American Cities: Results from the SALURBAL Study

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There is limited empirical evidence on how travel time affects dietary patterns, and even less in Latin American cities (LACs). Using data from 181 LACs, we investigated whether longer travel times at the city level are associated with lower consumption of vegetables and higher consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and if this association differs by city size. Travel time was measured as the average city-level travel time during peak hours and city-level travel delay time was measured as the average increase in travel time due to congestion on the street network during peak hours. Vegetables and sugar-sweetened beverages consumption were classified according to the frequency of consumption in days/week (5-7: "frequent", 2-4: "medium", and ≤1: "rare"). We estimate multilevel ordinal logistic regression modeling for pooled samples and stratified by city size. Higher travel time (Odds Ratio (OR) = 0.65; 95% Confidence Interval (CI) 0.49-0.87) and delay time (OR = 0.57; CI 0.34-0.97)...

Walking for transportation in large Latin American cities: walking-only trips and total walking events and their sociodemographic correlates

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Walking for transportation is a common and accessible means of achieving recommended physical activity levels, while providing important social and environmental co-benefits. Even though walking in rapidly growing urban areas has become especially challenging given the increasing dependence on motorised transportation, walking remains a major mode of transportation in Latin American cities. In this paper we aimed to quantify self-reported walking for transportation in Mexico City, Bogota, Santiago de Chile, Sao Paulo, and Buenos Aires, by identifying both walking trips that are conducted entirely on foot and walking events involved in trips mainly conducted on other means of transportation (e.g. private vehicle, public transit) among individuals ≥5-years old. We show how walking-only trips account for approximately 30% trips in the analysed cities, and we evidence how the pedestrian dimension of mobility is largely underestimated if walking that is incidental to other transportation...

The equigenic effect of greenness on the association between education with life expectancy and mortality in 28 large Latin American cities

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

BACKGROUND: Recent studies highlight the equigenic potential of greenspaces by showing narrower socioeconomic health inequalities in greener areas. However, results to date have been inconsistent and derived from high-income countries. We examined whether urban greenness modifies the associations between area-level education, as a proxy for socioeconomic status, and life expectancy and cause-specific mortality in Latin American cities. METHODS: We included 28 large cities, >137 million inhabitants, in nine Latin American countries, comprising 671 sub-city units, for 2012-2016. Socioeconomic status was assessed through a composite index of sub-city level education, and greenness was calculated using the normalized difference vegetation index. We fitted multilevel models with sub-city units nested in cities, with life expectancy or log(mortality) as the outcome. FINDINGS: We observed a social gradient, with higher levels of education associated with higher life expectancy and...

Parental stress increases body mass index trajectory in pre‐adolescents

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

WHAT IS ALREADY KNOWN ABOUT THIS SUBJECT: Rates of childhood obesity have increased since the mid-1970s. Research into behavioural determinants has focused on physical inactivity and unhealthy diets. Cross-sectional studies indicate an association between psychological stress experienced by parents and obesity in pre-adolescents. WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS: We provide evidence of a prospective association between parental psychological stress and increased weight gain in pre-adolescents. Family-level support for those experiencing chronic stress might help promote healthy diet and exercise behaviours in children. OBJECTIVE: We examined the impact of parental psychological stress on body mass index (BMI) in pre-adolescent children over 4 years of follow-up. METHODS: We included 4078 children aged 5-10 years (90% were between 5.5 and 7.5 years) at study entry (2002-2003) in the Children's Health Study, a prospective cohort study in southern California. A multi-level linear model simultaneously...

Traffic-related air pollution and obesity formation in children: a longitudinal, multilevel analysis

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

BackgroundBiologically plausible mechanisms link traffic-related air pollution to metabolic disorders and potentially to obesity. Here we sought to determine whether traffic density and traffic-related air pollution were positively associated with growth in body mass index (BMI = kg/m2) in children aged 5–11 years.MethodsParticipants were drawn from a prospective cohort of children who lived in 13 communities across Southern California (N = 4550). Children were enrolled while attending kindergarten and first grade and followed for 4 years, with height and weight measured annually. Dispersion models were used to estimate exposure to traffic-related air pollution. Multilevel models were used to estimate and test traffic density and traffic pollution related to BMI growth. Data were collected between 2002–2010 and analyzed in 2011–12.ResultsTraffic pollution was positively associated with growth in BMI and was robust to adjustment for many confounders. The effect size in the...

The role of geography in the complex diffusion of innovations