Health & place
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China faces rising rates of overweight, obesity, and physical inactivity among its citizens. Risk is highest in China's rapidly growing cities and urban populations. Current urban development practices and policies in China heighten this risk. ⋯ We examine key urban planning features and policies that shape urban environments that may compromise physical activity as part of everyday life, including walking and bicycling. We review the empirical research to identify planning and design strategies that support physical activity in other high-density cities in developing and developed countries. Finally, we identify successful strategies to increase physical activity in another growing, high-density city - New York City - to suggest strategies that may have relevance for rapidly urbanizing Chinese cities.
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Review
Racial/ethnic residential segregation: framing the context of health risk and health disparities.
An increasing body of public health literature links patterns of racial/ethnic residential segregation to health status and health disparities. Despite substantial new empirical work, meaningful understanding of the pathways through which segregation operates to influence health remains elusive. The literature on segregation and health was appraised with an emphasis on select conceptual, methodological, and analytical issues. Recommendations for advancing the next generation of racial/ethnic residential segregation and health research will require closer attention to sharpening the methodology of measuring segregation, testing mediating pathways and effect modification, incorporating stronger test of causality, exploring factors of resilience in segregated areas, applying a life-course perspective, broadening the scope of the investigation of segregation to include nativity status in blacks and other racial/ethnic groups, and linking segregation measures with biological data.
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This review examines the association between dog ownership and adult physical activity levels. While there is evidence to suggest that dog ownership produces considerable health benefit and provides an important form of social support that encourages dog owners to walk, there is limited evidence on the physical environmental and policy-related factors that affect dog owners walking with their dog. With the high level of dog ownership in many industrialized countries, further exploration of the relationship between dog ownership and physical activity levels may be important for preventing declining levels of physical activity and the associated detrimental health effects.
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Confinement has regained respectability in the discourses of contemporary UK mental health policy. This development reflects concern about violent offences by people with mental health problems and is rooted in claims about the 'failure' of community care. Confinement is presented as a strategic response to the risks and dangers posed by particular fractions of the population of mental health service users. ⋯ The paper notes its emergence as a consequence of the spatial impacts of deinstitutionalization and its specific origins in response to violent offences by people with mental health problems. The notion that the growing emphasis on confinement presages a return to the asylum is considered and rejected. Rather, the paper stresses the importance of discourses of protection, safety, risk and dangerousness in understanding the turn to confinement.