2026-08-30

7 arXiv categories· 96 journals· 1906 candidates — 4 worth your time· 100 without an open abstract

Headline

Hospital travel times and mortality, and wildfire structure loss predictors

Today, together

tag shift
no tag ran above its 30-day average
shares references
no items share references today counted over the 4 papers published above
on the same shoulders
no foundation work was cited by four of the day's papers counted over the 99 of this day's 104 named papers whose reference lists we have — standing on the same older work is not the same as being about the same thing
first appearance
Centre d'études Européennes de Sciences Po; Istituto Nazionale di Statistica none of them on a paper we published in the 79 days before this issue

Two counts, not one counted twice: every row here but “on the same shoulders” counts the papers published above, and that one counts every paper this day named — those and the ones under Also published today, whose abstracts we could not read.

This study analyzed the relationship between hospital travel times and mortality in Spain from 2010 to 2019 by combining population and mortality microdata with census-section level car travel times to the five nearest hospitals. Another paper mapped the intellectual architecture of housing discrimination research from 1972 to 2022 by analyzing a curated corpus of 1,350 peer-reviewed publications from Web of Science and Scopus. Finally, a third study analyzed the neoliberal transformation of the Swedish construction sector using a mixed-methods approach grounded in historical materialism.

published: Applied Geography

Virgilio Pérez, José M. Pavía, Josep Lledó
Applied Geography

Universitat de València

Urban Transport and Accessibility · Older Adults Driving Studies · Trauma and Emergency Care Studies · Universitat de València

Travel time to hospitals and mortality patterns: A multidimensional analysis by age, sex and cause of death

This study analyzed the relationship between hospital travel times and mortality in Spain from 2010 to 2019 by combining population and mortality microdata with census-section level car travel times to the five nearest hospitals. The analysis evaluated all-cause mortality alongside specific causes of death, finding that longer travel times correlate with higher mortality, particularly for adults aged 65 and older and for time-sensitive conditions. Circulatory diseases showed increased mortality risks even at short travel distances, while external causes of death exhibited steeper risk gradients at longer travel times.

Why it matters — It provides empirical evidence that geographic disparities in healthcare access lead to inequalities in mortality even within a country operating under a universal health coverage system.

Caveat: The study relies on car travel times from census-section centroids, which may not fully capture the actual transit modes or precise starting locations of individuals seeking emergency care.

Applied Geography · pdf · doi

published: Journal of Housing and the Built Environment

Dimosthenis Kifokeris, Rasmus Ahlstrand, Elton Chan, et al.
Journal of Housing and the Built Environment

Chalmers University of Technology

Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Employment and Welfare Studies · Urban Planning and Governance · Chalmers University of Technology · Lund University

From community building to commodity production: the political economy of the Swedish housing and building industry

This study analyzes the neoliberal transformation of the Swedish construction sector using a mixed-methods approach grounded in historical materialism. It introduces a 'triaxial threat space' framework to map the interactions between housing commodification, production fragmentation, and the labor theory of value, tracing how these forces affect the industry's traditional high-road model.

Why it matters — The research demonstrates that shifting from community-focused building to market-driven commodity production directly causes labor deskilling, worker exploitation, declining productivity, and degraded construction quality. It establishes a structural link between macroeconomic political shifts and the physical degradation of both building standards and labor conditions.

Caveat: The study relies on a theoretical framework applied to qualitative and historical trends, without providing specific quantitative metrics or statistical datasets to measure the precise scale of productivity declines or quality issues.

Journal of Housing and the Built Environment · pdf · doi

published: Journal of Housing and the Built Environment

Vanessa Ioannoni, Arianna Gatta, Tommaso Vitale
Journal of Housing and the Built Environment

Istituto Nazionale di Statistica

Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Feminist Theory and Gender Studies · Names, Identity, and Discrimination Research · Istituto Nazionale di Statistica · The University of Queensland · The University of Melbourne

Housing discrimination as a field in the making: institutional coupling, epistemic accumulation, and the uneven production of knowledge (1972–2022)

This study maps the intellectual architecture of housing discrimination research from 1972 to 2022 by analyzing a curated corpus of 1,350 peer-reviewed publications from Web of Science and Scopus. Using bibliometric mapping, co-authorship network analysis, term co-occurrence, and temporal analysis, it identifies three persistent thematic clusters: race-based discrimination and segregation; law, education, and social rights; and health, gender, and identity.

Why it matters — It demonstrates that academic knowledge production on housing discrimination is highly centralized in the US and UK, showing how research themes and epistemic asymmetries co-evolve with cycles of housing decommodification and fragmented policy changes.

Caveat: The analysis is limited to peer-reviewed publications indexed in Web of Science and Scopus, which may underrepresent research published in other databases or languages.

Journal of Housing and the Built Environment · doi

codepreprint

Parastoo Farajpoor, Mohammadreza Narimani
arXiv physics.geo-ph

Fire effects on ecosystems · Fire Detection and Safety Systems · Disaster Management and Resilience · gradient boosting · regression · satellite imagery

The spatial anatomy of urban wildfire vulnerability: a spatially validated GeoAI framework reveals the roles of building density and vegetation moisture in structure loss during the 2025 Palisades Fire

The study developed a spatially validated GeoAI workflow using XGBoost and logistic regression to analyze structure loss during the January 2025 Palisades Fire, utilizing 12,081 CAL FIRE damage inspections alongside Sentinel-2, Landsat, LANDFIRE, and OpenStreetMap data. Among 9,883 residential structures inspected, 5,566 were destroyed, with building count within 100 meters emerging as the strongest predictor of destruction (4.12-fold odds increase per standard deviation). Random cross-validation yielded an ROC-AUC of 0.92, which dropped to 0.75 under a more rigorous 1 km spatial block validation.

Why it matters — It demonstrates that standard random cross-validation severely overestimates the predictive accuracy of urban wildfire models, establishing spatial block validation as a necessary methodological standard for single-event risk assessments. It also quantifies how neighborhood-scale building density and the opposing roles of vegetation moisture (NDMI) and greenness (NDVI) drive urban structure loss.

Caveat: The predictive models and findings are derived from a single wildfire event, which may limit their direct generalizability to other geographic regions or different fire weather conditions.

arXiv · pdf · code

Still cited

Tijs Neutens (2015), Accessibility, equity and health care: review and research directions for transport geographers 1 of today's items cite it · 13 of 3240 in the archive stand on it

Also published today

These appeared today in journals we track. Their abstracts are not openly available, so we cannot summarise them.