Urban Ecological Containers, Environmental Risk Cells, and the Use of Medical Services

• Published in: Economic geography Vol. 52; no. 2; pp. 171 - 180
• Main Authors: Shannon, G. W., Spurlock, C. W.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Worcester, Mass Routledge 01-04-1976; Clark University
• Subjects: Ellipses; Environmental risk; Geodetic position; Health hazards; Patient care; Physicians; Retirement communities; Urban ecology; Urban landscape; Urban space
• ISSN: 0013-0095; 1944-8287
• DOI: 10.2307/143363

The human species has created a new environment-the urban landscape-an artificial one in which the complexity and scale of containment is comparable to the natural. An urban ecology is required so that the new environment may be fully understood. This is critical to understanding urban space as a framework within which health hazards are structured and patterns of therapeutic behavior are manifest by the urban population.
An initial empirical exploration of the linkage between the concepts of urban ecological containers, environmental risk cells, and the use of medical services is presented. More specifically, the activity spaces and travel patterns of 243 families residing in a sub-community of the District of Columbia are compared for differential use of urban space beyond the immediate neighborhood. The observed use of the urban landscape by residents of this same community is subsequently observed relative to the location of utilized health services.
Substantially different urban ecological containers are observed for residents of the same community, and concomitantly the residents are found to be exposed to different sets of health hazards, both in terms of environmental structure and communicable disease. The observed urban ecological containers may define a subsystem pertinent to the distribution of medical facilities. For certain groups within the sub-community there is a substantial imbalance between the locational subsets of medical facilities available and the locational patterns of other activities.