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For the residents of public housing, whose mobility is often reduced due to their precarious economic situation and their stage in the life cycle, the accessibility of services and facilities is a fundamental concern. Moreover, in Montreal, public housing is dispersed throughout the city. Accessibility thus varies greatly from one building to the next. The aims of this study are first to evaluate the accessibility of various urban resources using spatial data analysis in geographical information systems and then to develop an indicator of the accessibility of services and facilities for each public housing project using multivariate data analysis. The final results show that there are eight sub-types of landscape facilities around public housing buildings. Overall, half of the residents of public housing buildings have very good or good accessibility to services and facilities. Most of these residents live in public housing in some of the central or relatively central districts. On the other hand, for 45 per cent of public housing residents, there is a low level of access and 5 per cent have very limited service accessibility.

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Recent studies on urban poverty in Canadian cities suggest a growing spatial concentration of poor populations within metropolitan regions. This article assesses trends in the intra‐urban distribution of the poor population from 1986 to 2006 in eight of Canada's largest cities. We consider five well‐known dimensions of segregation, as identified by Massey and Denton (1988), in order to examine changes in the spatial distribution of poor populations within metropolitan areas: evenness, exposure, concentration, clustering, and centralization. These indices were calculated for low‐income populations at the census tract level using data from five Canadian censuses. Although each metropolitan area has distinctive characteristics, we were able to identify some general trends. The results suggest that, in 2006 compared to 1986, low‐income populations lived in more spatially concentrated areas, which were, at the same time, socioeconomically more homogeneous and more dispersed throughout the metropolitan area. In addition, we observed that over the last twenty years areas of poverty have been located, for the most part, in neighbourhoods adjacent to downtown cores. Nevertheless, we found that poverty has mostly increased in suburban areas located outside inner‐city neighbourhoods. Growing socioeconomic homogeneity and dispersion of low income areas in metropolitan areas reveal new spatial patterns of urban poverty distribution. These findings should be cause for concern as social isolation in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods could affect the life chances and opportunities for the residents of those areas.

Urban quality of life, Geographical information systems, Spatial analysis, Public housing, Montréal, Built environment,

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Road traffic noise is one of the most detrimental environmental nuisances for the population. Prolonged exposure to high road noise levels can lead to various problems in people's health and well-being. The objective of this article is to determine whether the groups most vulnerable to road noise, that is, children under 15 years old, people 65 years old and over, and the groups most likely to experience high nuisance levels, visible minorities and low-income individuals, are affected by an environmental inequity related to this nuisance. The method of estimating this nuisance employed in the study is based on a combination of several elements: that is, average traffic flows, road geometries, normal atmospheric conditions, and the characteristics of the urban environment. All of these parameters were considered for the 14 boroughs that make up the central portion of the Island of Montreal. Modelling was used to calculate the maximum daily road noise, based in part on the LimA software predictive model and according to the XPS 31-133 computation method. The results obtained from three different statistical tests and spatial regression analyses show that, on the one hand, the groups chosen on the basis of age are not affected by any environmental inequity. On the other hand, low-income individuals and visible minorities live in city blocks marked by road traffic noise levels that are slightly higher than those experienced by the rest of the population.