Search

Congestion (low average speeds) and unreliability (variability in travel times due to factors such as incidents, construction, special events, and weather) are two well-recognized undesirable characteristics of transportation systems. Travel-demand models have routinely incorporated the effect of congestion on the mode of travel, time-of-day of travel, and route of travel by using travel times and travel speeds as explanatory factors.

Since the early twentieth century, several academic disciplines have invested considerable energies in the study of people and their use of, and their connection to, place. One of the weakest areas of current practice in social science and health research is the conceptualization of place. For the most part, studies of the relationship between people and place, and specifically health and well-being outcomes, are based on several conventional, naive, and tenuous assumptions regarding place and human spatial behavior. In this chapter, I introduce the concept of spatial polygamy – briefly that we belong to multiple nested and nonnested places – and use this to critique the measure of place based on residential units such as the census tracts. It is important to note that the critique of the naive assumption of bounded, static, and isolated units such as census tracts in studies of place is not new. To illustrate this, I will review some literature from sociology and geography and some from almost a century ago. The empirical sections of the paper introduce two different types of research that seek to explore and better understand relationships between people and place. Using data gathered in ethnographic studies, I will show the complexity of lived lives and how the use of multiple place(s) varies in juggling different individual and family responsibilities among low-income and minority families. An approach based on secondary data from the US Census demonstrates a different way in which research on places can be more explicit about issues of scale and the spatial relationships between places. These two very different examples will be followed by a brief discussion of the research potential afforded by developments in new tracking technologies, innovative data collection methods, and methodological tools. The time is ripe for updating our conceptual models of place and to take advantage of emerging technologies, methods, and data. A renewed focus on theoretical and conceptual development will help to push research on place and health forward.

How has immigration and the associated growth in the Hispanic population affected the evolution of housing prices and rents in the United States? The answer to this question depends on the scale of the local housing demand shock associated with immigration and the growth in the Hispanic population in a city. This chapter reviews the existing literature on the issue and introduces a number of new facts. Cities that received immigrants experienced faster housing price and rent appreciation during the last two decades of the 20th century. Hispanic-dense metropolitan areas have more expensive housing. Part of the price differential is due to the growth in the Hispanic population, and we derive a statistical causal link between Hispanic growth and average housing price growth. However, within metropolitan areas it is precisely those neighborhoods with increasing Hispanic share where relatively slower housing price and rent appreciation took place. The facts are consistent with immigrant and Hispanic population growth generally driving up the demand for living in a city, but with increasing ethnic segregation within the city.

The City of Oakland, CA, with the nation’s the fifth busiest maritime shipping port, has persevered through several major disasters in recent years. The region’s geography and its designation as a high value terrorist target present an unquestionable public safety challenge. This chapter discusses the characteristic strategies the city and Port employ to protect its people and resources against potential threats and hazards in an environment of limited multi-jurisdictional resources. Through the collaboration of a broad coalition of stakeholders, active information sharing, and the use of various enabling technologies, the city and the Port are able to prepare, prevent, respond, and recover from potential risks both natural and manmade.