Aynaz Lotfata

University of California System

Enhancing walkability provides a holistic solution to a variety of urban problems. Walkability is a quantitative and qualitative measurement of how inviting or un-inviting an area is to pedestrians. Adding a quantitative approach to qualitative research can provide a more holistic (and quantifiable) view of the built environment on a microscale. Ne...

The Pacitan Regency, located on the southern coast of Java adjacent to the Indian Ocean, is susceptible to tsunami disasters due to its geographical location. Therefore, mitigation efforts are essential, including the development of tsunami modeling and evacuation strategies. While previous studies have combined these aspects, simulations involving...

Indonesia is experiencing a rise in natural disasters due to its geographical position within a tropical region, with the Upper Solo River watershed exhibiting a heightened risk of flooding. This region has already suffered numerous floods due to excessive precipitation and insufficient drainage. Susceptibility, hazard, and risk studies have been c...

Indonesia is experiencing a rise in natural disasters due to its geographical position within a tropical region, with the Upper Solo River watershed exhibiting a heightened risk of flooding. This region has already suffered numerous floods due to excessive precipitation and insufficient drainage. Susceptibility, hazard, and risk studies have been c...

Objective Access to specialized orthopedic care is an important determinant of the decision to undergo total knee replacement (TKR); however, most studies have mainly used distance to the nearest high‐volume hospital as the primary proxy for access. We applied the two‐step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method to develop a more comprehensive TKR a...

Brucellosis, a zoonotic disease caused by Brucella bacteria, poses significant risks to human, livestock, and wildlife health, alongside economic losses from livestock morbidity and mortality. This study improves Human Brucellosis Susceptibility Mapping (HBSM) by integrating the Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) with meta-heuristic algo...

Understanding the spatial and temporal dynamics of air pollutants is crucial for effective urban air pollution management. This study focuses on the temporal dynamics of air quality monitoring stations (AQMSs) and the association among air pollutants, particularly PM2.5, in Tehran, Iran. Using time series clustering and the Copula model, we analyze...

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a highly contagious viral disease that affects cloven-hoofed animals such as sheep, cattle, goats, and buffalo. It is recognized as one of the most destructive animal diseases, primarily attributed to its significant financial impact. We used a machine learning model to predict FMD occurrence at the county level in I...

Background The choice of an appropriate similarity measure plays a pivotal role in the effectiveness of clustering algorithms. However, many conventional measures rely solely on feature values to evaluate the similarity between objects to be clustered. Furthermore, the assumption of feature independence, while valid in certain scenarios, does not h...

Soil salinization threatens agricultural productivity, leading to desertification and land degradation. Given the challenges of conducting labor-intensive and expensive field studies and laboratory analyses on a large scale, recent efforts have focused on leveraging remote sensing techniques to study soil salinity. This study assesses the importanc...

In this study, we addressed two primary challenges: firstly, the issue of domain shift, which pertains to changes in data characteristics or context that can impact model performance, and secondly, the discrepancy between semantic similarity and geographical distance. We employed topic modeling in conjunction with the BERT architecture. Our model w...

Mental disorders pose a significant global challenge, particularly accentuated by the escalated prevalence during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. In addressing this critical issue, the utilization of web-based telehealth systems emerges as a promising solution to provide essential healthcare services to individuals grappling with mental disorders....

People's actions and behaviours contribute to the diversity and personality of a space, transforming it into a vibrant and thriving living environment. The main goal of this research is to present a GIS-based framework for assessing places. The framework is constructed based on the idea of conceptual spaces, integrating spatial and semantic concept...

In developing countries, the interaction between rapid urban expansion and population growth brings forth a host of challenges, particularly concerning essential services like healthcare. While interest in site suitability analysis for identifying optimal hospital locations to ensure equitable and secure healthcare access is on the rise, the absenc...

This study provides an innovative collaborative spatial decision support system (SDSS) that aims to ensure an equitable spatial distribution of healthcare services. Evaluating the equality of access to health services across different geographical areas is important, as it requires the analysis of various criteria such as the proximity of health ce...

The Zagros oak forests in Iran are facing a concerning decline due to prolonged and severe drought conditions over several decades, compounded by the simultaneous impact of temperature on oak populations. This study in oak woodlands of central Zagros forests in Lorestan province analyzed abiotic factors such as climate properties, topographic featu...

Background This study is designed to explore the potential impact of individual and environmental residential factors as risk determinants for bone and soft tissue cancers, with a particular focus on the Indonesian context. While it is widely recognized that our living environment can significantly influence cancer development, there has been a not...

This study addresses the challenges associated with emergency department (ED) overcrowding and emphasizes the need for efficient risk stratification tools to identify high-risk patients for early intervention. While several scoring systems, often based on logistic regression (LR) models, have been proposed to indicate patient illness severity, this...

Background Leptospirosis, a zoonotic disease, stands as one of the prevailing health issues in some tropical areas of Iran. Over a decade, its incidence rate has been estimated at approximately 2.33 cases per 10,000 individuals. Our research focused on analyzing the spatiotemporal clustering of Leptospirosis and developing a disease prevalence mode...

Background This study is designed to explore the potential impact of individual and environmental residential factors as risk determinants for bone and soft tissue cancers, with a particular focus on the Indonesian context. While it is widely recognized that our living environment can significantly influence cancer development, there has been a not...

Background In recent times, the concept of smart cities has gained remarkable traction globally, driven by the increasing interest in employing technology to address various urban challenges, particularly in the healthcare domain. Smart cities are proving to be transformative, utilizing an extensive array of technological tools and processes to imp...

Background: Health information technology (IT) significantly improves patient self-care and the health outcomes of those with conditions like hypertension. Methods: In 2022, we conducted a comprehensive literature review to identify factors impacting health IT adoption in hypertension management. We extensively searched databases like Scopus, Web o...

Road crashes are a major cause of fatalities worldwide, posing significant challenges for road safety experts in selecting appropriate crash frequency estimation models. This study introduces Localized Safety Performance Functions (C-SPFs), which explore the spatial variation of crash frequency and the spatial correlation between dependent variable...

Background: In recent times, the concept of smart cities has gained remarkable traction globally, driven by the increasing interest in employing technology to address various urban challenges, particularly in the healthcare domain. Smart cities are proving to be transformative, utilizing an extensive array of technological tools and processes to im...

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a highly contagious animal disease caused by a ribonucleic acid (RNA) virus, with significant economic costs and uneven distribution across Asia, Africa, and South America. While spatial analysis and modeling of FMD are still in their early stages, this research aimed to identify socio-environmental determinants of F...

Background Mental disorders pose a significant global challenge, particularly accentuated by the escalated prevalence during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. In addressing this critical issue, the utilization of web-based telehealth systems emerges as a promising solution to provide essential healthcare services to individuals grappling with mental...

Background Some studies have established associations between the prevalence of new-onset asthma and asthma exacerbation and socioeconomic and environmental determinants. However, research remains limited concerning the shape of these associations, the importance of the risk factors, and how these factors vary geographically. Objective We aimed (1...

In recent years, a growing body of research has investigated the factors influencing land surface temperature (LST) in different cities, employing diverse methodologies. Our study aims to be one of the few to examine the socio-environmental variables (SV) of LST with a holistic approach, especially in primate cities in developing countries, which a...

This conceptual, qualitative interdisciplinary research investigates, systematically and holistically, climate-adaptive spatial design interventions for high-density informal urban areas in arid climates, which remain understudied despite their vulnerability to heat stress and the heat-vulnerable groups populating them. Five streetscape design prot...

The study aims to identify fire patterns in Mashhad, the second-most populous city in Iran, between 2015 and 2019. Spatial scan statistics were utilized to determine the spatiotemporal patterns of 29,889 fire events in the research area. There were four primary types of fires: (1) structural fires (39%), (2) vehicle fires (11%), (3) green and open...

The ongoing debate on the adaptation of urban environments in the context of climate alterations and the COVID-19 pandemic underlines the need for an organization of urban spaces and structures that promote active mobility, socialisation, sports, and recreational activities. This emerging need intersects with the broader issue of the built environm...

Background Implementing workplace preventive interventions reduces occupational accidents and injuries, as well as the negative consequences of those accidents and injuries. Online occupational safety and health training is one of the most effective preventive interventions. This study aims to present current knowledge on e-training interventions,...

Maninjau Lake is one of Indonesia's lakes used for hydroelectric power plants, tourism, and fish farming activities. Some activities around the lake cause pollution, leading to massive fish kills. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor water quality regularly. One of the critical water quality parameters is biochemical oxygen demand (BOD). This stud...

The increase in physical inactivity prevalence in the USA has been associated with neighborhood characteristics. While several studies have found an association between neighborhood and health, the relative importance of each component related to physical inactivity or how this value varies geographically (i.e., across different neighborhoods) rema...

Mental distress is an epidemic that endangers global well-being and contributes to various illnesses. In the United States, the prevalence of mental distress has risen rapidly in recent years. However, this topic is understudied in spatial information research, as current literature lacks focus on spatially varying relationships between mental dist...

International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment. As the guest editors of this issue, we called researchers to reflect on the questions of what makes regions, localities and urban spatial elements (anti)adaptive. How can the likelihood of urban elements' adaptability to disasters/stressors be defined? And how can urban elements...

In recent years, remote sensing technology has enabled researchers to fill the existing statistics and research gaps on evapotranspiration in different land use classes. Thus, a remotely sensed-based approach was employed to investigate how evapotranspiration rates changed in differ- ent land use/cover classes across the Lake Urmia Basin from 2016...

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a highly contagious animal disease caused by a ribonucleic acid (RNA) virus, with significant economic costs and uneven distribution across Asia, Africa, and South America. While spatial analysis and modeling of FMD are still in their early stages, this research aimed to identify socio-environmental determinants of F...

There are different area-based factors affecting the COVID-19 mortality rate in urban areas. This research aims to examine COVID-19 mortality rates and their geographical association with various socioeconomic and ecological determinants in 350 of Tehran's neighborhoods as a big city. All deaths related to COVID-19 are included from December 2019 t...

In the United States, the rise in hypertension prevalence has been connected to neighborhood characteristics. While various studies have found a link between neighborhood and health, they do not evaluate the relative dependence of each component in the growth of hypertension and, more significantly, how this value differs geographically (i.e., acro...

In any hazard risk studies, protecting vulnerable groups should be addressed while people have different capacities and levels of resilience to risk. In this entry, we promote the analysis of vulnerability to climate-driven hazards by applying the intersectionality prospect. We call for intersectionality as a qualitative approach that can foster th...

The multifunctionality of urban elements is inevitable in the growing complexity of cities to make highly nested social and spatial contexts resilient to unexpected conditions. The “multifunctional spaces” concept is used besides the mixed-use, multi-use, and multi-purpose definitions, often without any distinction. Designing multifunctional urban...

Implementing infrastructure development projects using public–private partnership (PPP) delivery method has not been widely successful, particularly in developing countries such as Iran. Therefore, it is essential and indispensable to evaluate the critical success factors (CSFs) for completing abandoned public sports facilities projects (APSFPs) vi...

: Some studies have established relationships between neighborhood conditions and health. However, they neither evaluate the relative importance of neighborhood components in increasing obesity nor, more crucially, how these neighborhood factors vary geographically. We use the geographical random forest to analyze each factor’s spatial variation an...

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Jakarta, Indonesia, the government designated some hospitals as specific COVID-19 healthcare centers to meet demand and ensure accessibility. However, the policy demand evaluation was based on a purely spatial approach. Studies on accessibility to healthcare are widely available, but those that cons...

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Jakarta, Indonesia, the government designated some hospitals as specific COVID-19 healthcare centers to meet demand and ensure accessibility. However, the policy demand evaluation was based on a purely spatial approach. Studies on accessibility to healthcare are widely available, but those that cons...

Water availability in lakes must be studied in order to better manage ecosystems within lake basins and meet economic development needs. Despite being Iran’s largest lake, Lake Urmia’s water level and surface area have declined dramatically over the past two decades. During the same period, Lake Van in Turkey maintained a relatively stable water le...

A Community-based health intervention has long been defined as any intervention, policy, program, or action aimed at improving health and reducing health inequalities for individuals living in high-risk neighborhoods or areas with limited geographical resources, as well as high-risk individuals with underlying diseases. Health initiatives at the lo...

To date, research has largely ignored residential determinants of obesity prevalence. There is very little information on whether these impacts change spatially and operate at different spatial scales. As a result, the purpose of this study is to identify the housing determinants of obesity in Chicago, Illinois, using multiscale geographically weig...

Iran's Yazd Province has expanded its economy during the past 40 years due to requests from investors and decisions made by the Provincial Planning and Development Council. This article aims to aid the council's decision-making process by presenting an analytical method for determining whether a region is suitable, unsuitable, or conditionally suit...

Previous research has largely ignored the neighborhood’s vitality in creating a relaxing and safe environment for the prevalence of physical activity. Neighborhood vitality is critical for a healthy urban environment, and outdoor safety can only be ensured by reducing crime and repurposing underutilized spaces. A global regression and two local reg...

This chapter applies a design-based approach to integrate the innovative greenery measures in a high-density unplanned area of Imbaba to mitigate the urban heat island (UHI) effect and provide high quality open spaces by creating a chain of cooling public spaces called “Takeeba.” The literature review was applied to propagate the formulation of the...

Purpose Tehran’s health-care system is growing, yet it lacks emergency planning procedures. The premise of this study is that the urban environment around a hospital is just as robust as the hospital itself. This study aims to look at hospital resilience in an urban setting to see where it may be improved to keep the hospital operational during a d...

Introduction Obesity is an epidemic that threatens global wellbeing and contributes to an array of illnesses. The prevalence of obesity in the United States has increased substantially in past decades. Focusing on the city of Chicago, IL, USA as a case study, we investigate spatiotemporally varying relationships between obesity and three characteri...

The literature informs assumptions about the relationship between obesity prevalence and socioeconomic and environmental factors. Little is known about the relationship between obesity, air temperature, unhealthy behaviors, and socioeconomic factors in the USA. We used regressive models like Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Geographically Weighted Reg...

This paper evaluates hypothesized dual uses of the public schools to increase walking accessibility to open spaces as a part of the permanent urban interventions. The Two-step Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) method was adopted to measure the 20 min walking accessibility of the public schools in Cook County, the home of the Chicago Metropolitan. We...

The pandemic's lockdown has made physical inactivity unavoidable, forcing many people to work from home and increasing the sedentary nature of their lifestyle. The link between spatial and socio-environmental dynamics and people's levels of physical activity is critical for promoting healthy lifestyles and improving population health. Most studies...

Purpose – It is observed that the COVID-19 Pandemic mostly restricts people’s movement and walking habits. In this direction, this study aims to highlight how the walking behaviors of individuals affected in different geographies’ neighborhoods before and during the Pandemic. Design/methodology/approach – This paper focuses on the relationship betw...

Facilities management along with health care are two important aspects in controlling the spread of infectious diseases with regard to controlling the outbreak of global COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, with the increasing outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of examining the relationship between the built environment and the outbreak of infectio...

In dense urban areas, lack of public space is a current challenge in urban management. Urban spaces should be taken multifunctional roles to bring flexibility and opportunities to urban settings. Urban University campuses as occupied large areas should be well integrated into the urban structure to take the multifunctional roles besides the signifi...

In any hazard risk studies, protecting vulnerable groups should be addressed while people have different capacities and levels of resilience to risk. In this entry, we promote the analysis of vulnerability to climate-driven hazards by applying the intersectionality prospect. We call for intersectionality as a qualitative approach that can foster th...

Publish at International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment In this Special Issue, we welcome contributions to reflect on; • What makes regions, localities and urban spatial elements (anti)adaptive? How can the likelihood of urban elements adaptability to disasters/stressors be defined? • How does multifunctionality of urban e...

Purpose To reduce financial and human losses, managing risks associated with earthquakes is essential in practice. However, in using common risk management methods, experts are often faced with ambiguities that can create profound challenges for risk management. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a logical and straightforward risk assessment mod...

People who live with respiratory diseases like asthma are more likely at risk of serious illness. Spatial analytic techniques allow for discovering areas of concern and finding correlates of asthma prevalence. The purpose of the study is to describe socioeconomic factors associated with asthma prevalence in Cook County, IL, and to identify the sign...

Tehran's healthcare system is under increasing strain due to population expansion and a lack of disaster preparedness measures. The purpose of this paper is to analyze hospital resilience in an urban setting to identify areas for improvement to keep the studied hospital operational during a crisis. In this study, the Urban Resilience Index (URI) in...

Purpose Having easy access to the flu and COVID-19 vaccination sites may be important for controlling the spread of the infection. Chicago implemented a broad strategy of opening COVID-19 vaccination locations across the city in a variety of locations. Design/methodology/approach We defined access as having vaccinations within one mile. Data came...