There has been much speculation about a possible association between the social and built environment and health, but the empirical evidence is still elusive. The social and built environments are best seen as contextual concepts but they are usually estimated as an aggregation of individual...

Perceptions that rural populations are inevitably healthier and live longer than urban populations are increasingly being challenged. But very few publications have investigated the extent to which these putative differences can be explained by variation in area composition. Existing...