Recently, Google Street View (GSV) has been examined as a tool for remotely conducting systematic observation of the built environment. Studies have found it offers benefits over in-person audits, including efficiency, safety, cost, and the potential to expand built environment research to larger areas and more places globally. However, one limitation has been the lack of documentation on the date of imagery collection. In 2011, Google began placing a date stamp on images which now enables investigation of this concern. This study questions the spatio-temporal stability in the GSV date stamp. Specifically, is the imagery collected contemporaneously? If not, how frequently and where is imagery from different time periods woven together to represent environmental conditions in a particular place. Furthermore, how much continuity exists in imagery for a particular time period? Answering these questions will provide guidance on the use of GSV as a tool for built environment audits.

How people feel about places matters, especially in their neighborhood. It matters for their health, the health of their children, and their social cohesion and use of local resources. A growing body of research in public health, planning, psychology, and sociology bears out this point. Recently, a new methodological tack has been taken to find out how people feel about places. The sketch map, a once popular tool of behavioral geographers and environmental psychologists to understand how people perceive the structural aspects of places, is now being used in concert with geographic information systems (GIS) to capture and spatially analyze the emotional side of urban environmental perception. This confluence is generating exciting prospects for what we can learn about the characteristics of the urban environment that elicit emotion. However, due to the uncritical way this approach has been employed to date, excitement about the prospects must be tempered by the acknowledgement of its potential problems. In this paper we review the extant research on integrating sketch maps with GIS and then employ a case study of mapping youth fear in Los Angeles gang neighborhoods to demonstrate these prospects and the problems, particularly in the areas of (1) representation of environmental perception in GIS and (2) spatial analysis of these data.

A call has recently been made by the public health and medical communities to understand the neighborhood context of a patient’s life in order to improve education and treatment. To do this, methods are required that can collect “contextual” characteristics while complementing the spatial analysis of more traditional data. This also needs to happen within a standardized, transferable, easy-to-implement framework. The Spatial Video Geonarrative (SVG) is an environmentally-cued narrative where place is used to stimulate discussion about fine-scale geographic characteristics of an area and the context of their occurrence. It is a simple yet powerful approach to enable collection and spatial analysis of expert and resident health-related perceptions and experiences of places. Participants comment about where they live or work while guiding a driver through the area. Four GPS-enabled cameras are attached to the vehicle to capture the places that are observed and discussed by the participant. Audio recording of this narrative is linked to the video via time stamp. A program (G-Code) is then used to geotag each word as a point in a geographic information system (GIS). Querying and density analysis can then be performed on the narrative text to identify spatial patterns within one narrative or across multiple narratives. This approach is illustrated using case studies on post-disaster psychopathology, crime, mosquito control, and TB in homeless populations. SVG can be used to map individual, group, or contested group context for an environment. The method can also gather data for cohorts where traditional spatial data are absent. In addition, SVG provides a means to spatially capture, map and archive institutional knowledge. SVG GIS output can be used to advance theory by being used as input into qualitative and/or spatial analyses. SVG can also be used to gain near-real time insight therefore supporting applied interventions. Advances over existing geonarrative approaches include the simultaneous collection of video data to visually support any commentary, and the ease-of-application making it a transferable method across different environments and skillsets.

Fine-scale and longitudinal geospatial analysis of health risks in challenging urban areas is often limited by the lack of other spatial layers even if case data are available. Underlying population counts, residential context, and associated causative factors such as standing water or trash locations are often missing unless collected through logistically difficult, and often expensive, surveys. The lack of spatial context also hinders the interpretation of results and designing intervention strategies structured around analytical insights. This paper offers a ubiquitous spatial data collection approach using a spatial video that can be used to improve analysis and involve participatory collaborations. A case study will be used to illustrate this approach with three health risks mapped at the street scale for a coastal community in Haiti.

Access to clean drinking water remains a significant health problem in the developing world. Traditional definitions of water access oversimplify the geographic context of water availability, the burden of water collection, and challenges faced along the path, mainly due to a lack of fine scale spatial data. This paper demonstrates how spatial video collected in three informal areas of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, can be used to quantify aspects of the walk to water. These include impediments encountered along the path such as changes in elevation and proximity to traffic. All are mapped along with classic health-related environmental and social information, such as standing water, drains, and trash. The issue of GPS error was encountered due to the built environment that is typical of informal settlements. The spatial video allowed for the correction of the path to gain a more accurate estimate of time and distance for each walk. The resulting mapped health risks at this fine scale of detail reveal micro-geographies of concern. Spatial video is a useful tool for visualizing and analyzing the challenges of water collection. It also allows for data generated along the walk to become part of both a household and local area risk assessment.

On 4 August 2012, the southeastern part of Kutubdia Island, Bangladesh, experienced coastal erosion and flooding associated with tidal waves, storms, and continuous heavy rainfall for two days. This provided a unique opportunity to study the relationship between rapid-onset disasters and migration decisions of individual households perpetually living under environmental risk. Using Kutubdia Island as a case study, this article examines the migration decisions of respondents in the immediate aftermath of two extreme natural events. Relevant data were primarily collected from a questionnaire survey conducted nearly two months after the occurrence of the event. The study's findings support the view that both environmental and nonenvironmental factors lead to migration. The article outlines several areas for further research on the links between migration and environmental stress.