Where We Live, Work, and Play

This chapter focuses on place, which is one of the key factors that determines whether or not we can live a healthy life, for the simple fact that place is a ubiquitous exposure. It first provides an overview of the link between place and health, before looking at the physical spaces where we live and work, our communities and transportation networks, and the condition of our global home. COVID-19 showed that for all the segregation in our society, for all the difference between high- and low-income neighborhoods, for all the variety of spaces we navigate, there is really only one place to truly speak of—the world we share. The story of place and health is ultimately the story how we can support the long-term sustainability of our planet. Just as it is not enough to have nice homes if they are situated in dangerous neighborhoods, it is not enough to make our communities more conducive to health if we neglect the broader environmental challenges that shape the health of our fragile, indispensable world. This means, centrally, mitigating the effects of climate change by designing healthier, more sustainable cities.

Place and Health Infrastructure in the Gulf Cooperation Council: A Systematic Scoping Review of GIS Applications in Health

The rising burden of non-communicable diseases is taxing health systems globally. Using data science and information systems is necessary to support public health practices. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are key to inform and help guide public health policies related to place (i.e. location or where one lives) and how it affects health. Despite the increasing use of GIS for public health globally, its applications to health in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states remains largely unknown. This systematic scoping review aimed to uncover how GIS has been used in the GCC states to understand “place” and “health”. A comprehensive search of the literature was performed in PubMed, Scopus, Science Citation Index Expanded, ScienceDirect, Embase, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library during June 2020. All journal articles involving the use of GIS for human health applications in the GCC states published in English in peerreviewed scientific journals were considered. After removing duplicates and applying eligibility criteria, qualitative content analysis was performed for 24 of 630 studies. GIS uses in the GCC states were categorized as health access and planning (n=9), health risk analysis (n=8), disease surveillance (n=6) and community health profiling (n=1). The majority of the uncovered evidence in this study focused on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The results of this study indicate a deficiency of published evidence regarding the use of GIS in support of public health in other GCC states. This stands to compromise planning and strategic decision making in health risk analysis, disease surveillance, community health profiling, health services provision and health interventions.

Contextualizing place and health in rural America: Cancer information seeking across four categories of an urban/rural continuum.

e18124 Background: Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Despite decreases in cancer mortality overall, rural populations continue to have higher prevalence and slower reduction of cancer death rates. As a preventive approach to combat cancer, the National Cancer Institute continues to prioritize providing the public with health information. Yet, little is known about cancer information-seeking across rural America. Methods: Using Rural-Urban Commuting Area Codes (RUCAs), from the 2018 Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS-5) database we analyze the odds of looking for information about cancer across four geo-political contexts (n = 2,625): urban, large-rural, small-rural, and isolated-rural areas, thus giving us a potentially more detailed understanding of place and health across the urban-rural continuum. Using an established social determinants framework, a series of logistic regression models were fitted to estimate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results: Across all models, those living in large rural towns had about 1.5 times the odds of looking for cancer information compared to urban-dwellers (p < 0.05) while those living in remote rural areas had about 0.5 times the odds (p < 0.05). There was no difference for those living in small rural towns. Additionally, gender, race/ethnicity, marital status, education, housing status, and internet availability were independently associated with information-seeking (p < 0.05). Conclusions: In this study, compared to urban-dwellers, those living in large rural towns appeared to have increased odds of looking for cancer information while those living in isolated rural areas had decreased odds. Understanding this relationship between place and health has implication for the allocation of resources and the design of interventions aimed at increasing information about cancer.

What Has Place Got to Do With It? Hot Spots Policing to Address Physical and Mental Health

In the last few decades of criminological research, the contextual concept of place has become a widely discussed and studied topic. Currently, one of the most studied and discussed place-based strategies is hot spots policing, the study of crime patterns at micro-geographic places. Since the 1980s, hot spots policing has become an important and empirically validated law enforcement intervention. One of the most novel questions about hot spots policing is whether it can be used to address other issues such as the intersection of crime, place, and health. Do concentrated patterns of physical and mental health issues mirror the patterns of crime at places? If so, can hot spots policing guide police interventions? This article reviews the current state of public health and place-based crime patterns to synthesize the concept of place-based interventions for health and crime. The article concludes with implications for the scholars and practitioners.