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C (2009) Towards an integrated understanding of green space in the European built environment. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 8 (2). pp. 65-75.

The main challenges in international health are to scale up effective health interventions in low- and middle-income countries in order to reach a higher proportion of the population. This can be achieved through better insight into how health systems are structured. Social network analysis can provide an appropriate and innovative paradigm for the health systems researcher, allow new analyses of the structure of health systems, and facilitate understanding of the role of stakeholders within a health system. The social network analysis methodology adapted to health systems research and described in detail by the authors comprises three main stages: (i) describing the set of actors and members of the network; (ii) characterizing the relationships between actors; and (iii) analysing the structure of the systems. Evidence generated through social network analysis could help policy makers to understand how health systems react over time and to better adjust health programmes and innovations to the capacities of health systems in low- and middle-income countries to achieve universal coverage.

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Mitigating the impact of increasing impervious surfaces on stormwater runoff by low impact development (LID) is currently being widely promoted at site and local scales. In turn, the series of distributed LID implementations may produce cumulative effects and benefit stormwater management at larger, regional scales. However, the potential of multiple LID implementations to mitigate the broad-scale impacts of urban stormwater is not yet fully understood, particularly among different design strategies to reduce directly connected impervious areas (DCIA). In this study, the hydrological responses of stormwater runoff characteristics to four different land use conversion scenarios at the city scale were explored using GIS-based Stormwater Management Model (SWMM). Model simulation results confirmed the effectiveness of LID controls; however, they also indicated that even with the most beneficial scenarios hydrological performance of developed areas was still not yet up to the pre-development level, especially, pronounced changes from pervious to impervious land.

Studies have repeatedly affirmed the positive links between human and environmental health but few have sufficiently addressed the complexity brought about by the range of urbanity, population and both green space and domestic gardens cover associated human settlements. With the global population increasingly residing in cities, the relevance of urbanisation, local population and discrete types of green space provision on measures of health, remains a research imperative. To explore this complexity, a series of regression models were employed to quantify the mitigation of local health deprivation by green space and domestic gardens, across a four-stage rural-urban gradient, controlling for household income and local population. The population-standardised quantification of green space provision offered greater interpretive power than did a simple measure of land cover density. Domestic gardens, of the two green land-cover types, provided the most convincing mitigating effect on health deprivation. The findings call for increased acknowledgement of urban gardens in local health promotion, and a closer consideration of local population in planning green space provision and management.