2026-09-24

96 journals· 279 candidates — 3 worth your time· 55 without an open abstract

no arXiv arXiv answered and returned nothing this day, so this issue covers the rest. The papers below are real — what is missing is the other half of the scope, not the reading.

Headline

Regional economic resilience, hospital resource accessibility and urban heat discomfort

Today, together

tag shift
no tag ran above its 30-day average
shares references
no items share references today counted over the 3 papers published above
on the same shoulders
no foundation work was cited by four of the day's papers counted over the 57 of this day's 58 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
Adamas University; Army Medical University; Daping Hospital; and 2 more none of them on a paper we published in the 104 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.

published: Applied Geography

Hasan Engìn Duran, Alessandra Faggian, Alessandra Michelangeli, et al.
Applied Geography

Izmir Institute of Technology

Regional resilience and development · COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts · Urbanization and City Planning · Izmir Institute of Technology · Gran Sasso Science Institute · University of Milano-Bicocca

Left behind places and regional resilience to COVID-19 shock in Europe

The study analyzes the relationship between regional development and economic resilience across 897 European NUTS 3 regions during the COVID-19 pandemic. It constructs a multidimensional 'left behindness' index to move beyond traditional GDP metrics, finding that left-behind regions resisted the initial pandemic shock better, whereas more developed regions recovered more quickly.

Why it matters — It demonstrates that regional economic resilience is not a single attribute; instead, vulnerability and recovery capacity are decoupled, meaning less-developed regions possess inherent resistance mechanisms while developed regions possess superior recovery dynamics.

Applied Geography · doi

published: Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy

Chao Tan, Wenliang Zhang, Ran Zheng, et al.
Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy

Army Medical University

Urban Transport and Accessibility · Health disparities and outcomes · Urban Design and Spatial Analysis · China · Army Medical University · Daping Hospital

Urban–Rural and Regional Inequalities in the Accessibility of Tiered Public Hospitals in Chongqing, China: A Comprehensive Assessment of Physician and Bed Resources

This study measured car-based accessibility to tiered public hospitals in Chongqing, China, using the Gaussian-based two-step floating catchment area (G2SFCA) method to evaluate both physician and bed resources. Applying the Dagum Gini coefficient at the subdistrict and township level, the analysis revealed that the city proper maintains higher average accessibility than other regions across all hospital grades. It also identified a hierarchical gradient in spatial consistency, with Pearson correlation coefficients between bed and physician accessibility dropping from 0.982 for Grade III hospitals to 0.620 for Grade I/ungraded hospitals.

Why it matters — The findings challenge the common assumption that urban-rural disparities are always the primary driver of healthcare inequality, demonstrating instead that the dominant source of inequality shifts between urban-rural and interregional dimensions depending on the specific hospital grade and resource type.

Caveat: The accessibility measurements are based solely on car travel, which may not reflect the actual transit modes used by lower-income or rural populations.

Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy · doi

published: Discover Cities

Munni Parial, Priya Khorat, Kasturi Mukherjee, et al.
Discover Cities

Adamas University

Urban Heat Island Mitigation · Urban Green Space and Health · Climate Change and Health Impacts · Adamas University · Vidyasagar University · Bankura University

Understanding the heat-induced discomforts associated with changing local climate zones in indian cities

This study mapped 16 Local Climate Zone (LCZ) types in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area from 2010 to 2023, analyzing their morphological changes alongside land surface temperatures and resident survey responses. The analysis revealed a significant shift toward compact mid-rise and low-rise built forms at the expense of vegetated areas, with the highest land surface temperatures concentrated in lightweight low-rise and heavy industrial zones. Survey data showed that human heat discomfort is driven by both the intensity of the temperature and the duration of exposure across different urban forms.

Why it matters — It connects physical urban morphology changes directly to human thermal experiences and duration of exposure, moving beyond purely physical temperature measurements to show how specific dense built forms exacerbate daily heat vulnerability.

Caveat: While the study links physical LCZ changes to human thermal comfort, the survey findings are based on a single metropolitan area, which may limit direct generalization to cities with different socio-economic or climatic contexts.

Discover Cities · doi

Still cited

Iain D. Stewart, T. R. Oke (2012), Local Climate Zones for Urban Temperature Studies 1 of today's items cite it · 41 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.