Concurrent assessment of urban environment and cardiometabolic risk over 10 years in a middle‐aged population‐based cohort

Inference regarding the impact of urban areas on health is limited by cross‐sectional studies assessing few dimensions and ignoring area‐level socio‐economic status. This study simultaneously assessed several dimensions of the built environment against incident cardiometabolic risk (CMR) arising over 10 years. It tested the hypothesis that, accounting for local area relative wealth, features of the built environment would not predict incident CMR. Initially, disease‐free adults in a biomedical cohort in Adelaide, Australia, provided address and clinical data over three waves of follow‐up. CMR was defined as the count of five clinical CMR factors. Built environment measures were derived for urban form, and natural, and food environments. Local area wealth was expressed using the relative location factor index. Poisson growth models accounting for within‐suburb clustering, age, sex, and education were used to estimate associations between built environment measures and increasing CMR. Fitted linear trajectories had statistically significant mean values of intercepts and slopes. CMR trajectories were associated with age, male sex, and low education. In models including measures of the food, natural, and urban form environments, per standard deviation increase, only POS count predicted incident CMR, which was more strongly predicted by relative location factor. Not accounting for local area socio‐economic status may overestimate the strength of relationships between health and the built environment. Inequity in accessible POS is robustly related to incident CMR.     

Biblical beliefs in the shaping of modern nations

The ideology and culture of modern nations and nationalism have been profoundly influenced by two traditions that reach back into the ancient world, the biblical and the classical. Here, the focus is on the particular contribution of the Hebrew Bible to the political ideals of modern nationhood. Modern Western nations, unlike non‐Western and ancient nations, are distinguished by their quest for territorial integrity and sovereignty, citizenship, legal standardisation, cultural homogeneity and secular education, while modern nationalism is a pro‐active, ideological movement that seeks to ‘build’ autonomous, unified, distinctive and ‘authentic’ nations out of ethnic populations deemed by some members to constitute actual or potential ‘nations’. While modern European nations emerged out of the matrix of Christianity, as Adrian Hastings argued, it was the political model and ideals of community found in the Hebrew Bible, which Christianity adopted (while rejecting the Jews) and which the New Testament lacked, that so often provided the dynamic of modern nationalism and the values of modern Western nations. Chief among these were the Pentateuchal and prophetic narratives of Exodus, Covenant, Community of Law (Torah), the holiness of a ‘chosen people’, the messianic role of sacred kingship and the dream of fulfilment in the Promised Land. These ideals did not fully come into their own until the Reformation. In this period, state elites expressed growing national sentiments and biblical texts were being rendered into the vernacular, while a more rigorous biblical form of ‘covenantal nationalism’ emerged in early modern Netherlands, Scotland and England, taking the narrative of the deliverance of the Israelites as its starting point. In the eighteenth‐century Enlightenment, the novel cults of ‘Nature’, ‘Authenticity’ and ‘Human Perfectibility’ secured an opening for neo‐classical political ideas in the formation of nations. But it was the biblical ideals of liberation, Covenant, election and promised land that provided the basic model of the modern nation and nationalism in Europe, from the French Revolution, and German and East European nationalisms to the Hebraic Protestant nationalism of Victorian Britain. To a large extent, the modern age owes to the Jewish Bible its fundamental vision of a world divided into distinctive and sovereign territorial nations.     

On Geocomputational Determinants of Entropic Variations for Urban Dynamics Studies

Monitoring population characteristics and their patterns of spatial evolution are fundamental components for urban management and policy decision‐making. Societal issues such as health, transport, or crime are often explored using a range of models describing the urban dynamics of population attributes at specific scales that can be seen as complementary. Using and simulating data at different scales of aggregation asks for the need to analyze and compare spatiotemporal variations in order to better understand the model behaviors and emerging properties of the geosimulation. This article analyzes the uses of the entropy measure in the literature and constraining factors needed for its potential extension to explore the variations in geographic and time scales. In particular, the article discusses the need for a truly spatial entropy that takes into account the spatial contiguities of the observations usually aggregated within a zoning system of areal units. Two generic solutions are exposed for the various geometries and attribute structures used for census‐related analyses; they are based on existing measures for point data using (i) co‐occurrences of observations and (ii) discriminant ratios of distances between groups of observations. Their extensions to areal compositional data are articulated around their conceptual changes and geocomputational challenges. A revisited and new version of the entropy decomposition theorem, encompassing a spatiality concept semantically related to correlation, is also presented as efficiently reusing the constrained hierarchical zoning system of administrative units to enable discovery of emerging spatial pattern features from the geosimulation. A comparison of the results between the classical use of entropy and the spatial entropy framework devised shows the flexibility and added capabilities of the approach for new types of analyses, thus allowing new insight into studies of population dynamics.     

The external effects of inner-city shopping centers: Evidence from the Netherlands

Shopping center redevelopment is inevitable to remain attractive for consumers. In this paper, we investigate the external effects of shopping center redevelopment on nearby residential property prices. Using a difference-in-difference empirical framework, we find the redevelopment has positive external effects on nearby property prices. We find the price of a property located next to a redeveloped shopping center increases by 1.43% on average just after redevelopment. Our results indicate that these positive external effects wear off rather rapidly across space and over time. This suggests that shopping center redevelopment plays a substantial, but limited, role in combating neighborhood deprivation.     

Spatial Poetics Under Authoritarianism: Graffiti and the Contestation of Urban Redevelopment in Contemporary China

This article investigates the expression of resistance to urban redevelopment in the authoritarian context of contemporary China. Where conventional channels of public expression are closed, the very space of urban transformation becomes an important medium of contestation. Through the practice of “spatial poetics”, residents manipulate the taken-for-granted meanings attached to urban space, challenging the spatial codes that authorise redevelopment. Working across four spatial dimensions—territory, place, scale, and network—these poetic manipulations allow residents to de-naturalise existing power structures, escape their effects, and re-code space with alternative meanings. The article illustrates the practice of spatial poetics through an analysis of Ciqikou, a historic district of Chongqing undergoing redevelopment. Residents expressed their resistance to redevelopment by writing slogans on buildings slated for demolition. By emphasising relationships of scale, network, and place, residents’ graffiti challenged the territorial basis of the Chinese party-state’s redevelopment project and revalorised the neighbourhood as worthy of preservation.     

Elevated lead exposure in Roman occupants of Londinium: New evidence from the archaeological record

The evolution of metallurgical practices over several millennia has resulted in human exposures to a diverse variety of toxic elements. These exposures were not just confined to the metalworkers, but in many cases broadly impacted the larger community and society. The role of lead in Roman civilization is particularly fascinating, where the available evidence of lead use in a myriad of applications by Roman civilization suggests the potential for elevated exposures. The present paper addresses the hypothesis that because of these practices, Roman occupants of ancient Londinium (43–410 ad ) were exposed to levels of lead that far exceeded exposures in the preceding populations of Iron Age Britain (700 bc –43 ad ). The elemental content and stable lead and strontium isotopic signatures of 30 femora from three Londinium cemeteries and radiocarbon-dated representative burials were examined and the results then compared with 70 femora dating to the pre-Roman Iron Age from the well-known Iron Age hillfort of Danebury, Hampshire, and from three cemeteries in East Yorkshire. Extensive efforts were directed at the minimization of sediment and soil contamination, the assessment of contamination from burial artefacts and a careful review of the burial context of specimens. Data for lead and 20 additional trace and major elements were obtained by magnetic sector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS), after acid dissolution of pre-cleaned bone cores. Lead isotope ratios in the bone core digests (and burial soils) were measured by multi-collector ICPMS. It was found that concentrations of lead in the Roman/Londinium-era femora were > 70-fold greater than those from pre-Roman populations. This was confirmed by femoral data obtained from the analysis of a pre-Roman burial from the early first century bc found adjacent to the Southern Cemetery. Several major and trace element metrics for diagenesis demonstrate that levels of lead in the bone are robust indicators of human exposure during life. Lead isotope data for the Roman population are consistent with previously identified widespread lead pollution. The pre-Roman populations contain lead isotopic compositions consistent with highly localized, minor sources of lead. Together, these data provide unequivocal confirmation that the Romans in Londinium were exposed to elevated lead levels. Elevated blood lead levels would have resulted, negatively affecting their health and possibly contributing to declining birth rates.     

The remains of the saints: the evidence of early medieval relic collections

This article explores the materiality of early medieval devotion to the saints. It argues that, even though most of the material objects themselves no longer survive, there is nevertheless much to be gleaned from surviving caches of relic labels about what churches believed they possessed. It exploits the same evidence to explore how types of relic‐objects changed over time, track evidence for the importance of oral tradition in their formation, and identify pathways of circulation. In demonstrating how churches curated the relics in their care, it pinpoints the active participation of scribes and relic custodians in interpreting and re‐interpreting them.