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For as long as people have met and gathered in small villages, in larger cities, at religious events or along travel routes, for shorter or longer periods of time, people have engaged in trading goods – the forerunner of today's retailing. Hence, retail is an economic sector with a long history (Stobart & Howard, 2019). Most early retail took place in town centres, establishing the relationship between trade and urban agglomeration (Coleman, 2006). A general rule has been that retail is located where the customers are (May, 1989), owing to the economic potential of proximity to larger consumer markets. This is true not only for retailing, but for almost all economic activities in liberal markets (Scott, 1998), and the general trend is a drainage of investments, companies and people in sparsely populated rural and peripheral localities in favour of urban agglomerations (Lindgren et al., 2017), at least when it comes to physical retailing, which is the focus of this chapter.

There has been a strong degree of interest over the last 30 years towards immigrant segregation in Europe. This paper aims to contribute towards the existing body of research by extending the multi-scalar analysis of patterns of immigrant residential segregation into a coherent international comparative study of cities of different sizes. We investigate the patterns of immigrant-native segregation at different geographical scales, along with their correlates, in more than a hundred cities in 2011 across Germany, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Our findings suggest that cities in the UK are the most highly segregated in Europe. The positions of the other countries in the ‘European segregation ranking’ depend upon the considered immigrant group and spatial scale. The national context is consistently the most important factor in understanding segregation at multiple spatial scales. However, even while taking into account the national contexts, the structural-ecological factors remain important predictors of segregation patterns in Europe.

AIMS: To estimate the overall health impact of transferring commuting trips from car to bicycle.

METHODS: In this study registry information on the location of home and work for residents in Stockholm County was used to obtain the shortest travel route on a network of bicycle paths and roads. Current modes of travel to work were based on travel survey data. The relation between duration of cycling and distance cycled was established as a basis for selecting the number of individuals that normally would drive a car to work, but have a distance to work that they could bicycle within 30 minutes. The change in traffic flows was estimated by a transport model (LuTrans) and effects on road traffic injuries and fatalities were estimated by using national hospital injury data. Effects on air pollution concentrations were modelled using dispersion models.

RESULTS: Within the scenario, 111,000 commuters would shift from car to bicycle. On average the increased physical activity reduced the one-year mortality risk by 12% among the additional bicyclists. Including the number of years lost due to morbidity, the total number of disability adjusted life-years gained was 696. The amount of disability adjusted life-years gained in the general population due to reduced air pollution exposure was 471. The number of disability adjusted life-years lost by traffic injuries was 176. Also including air pollution effects among bicyclists, the net benefit was 939 disability adjusted life-years per year.

CONCLUSIONS: Large health benefits were estimated by transferring commuting by car to bicycle.

In most societies, resources and opportunities are concentrated in neighbor-hoods and workplaces occupied by the host population. The spatial assimilationand place stratification theories propose trajectories (the sequences of events)leading to minority and migrant access to or exclusion from these advantageousplaces. However, most previous research on these theories did not ask whethersuch theorized trajectories occur. We apply sequence analysis to decade-long res-idence and workplace histories of newly arrived migrants in Sweden to identify atypology of combined residence-work trajectories. The seven types of trajecto-ries in our typology are characterized by varying degrees of proximity to thehost population in residential neighborhoods and workplaces and by different pat-terns of change in such proximity over time. The pivotal role of socioeconomicgains in spatial assimilation, posited by the namesake theory, is not supported, aswe do not find that migrant employment precedes residence alongside the hostpopulation. The importance of housing-market discrimination for migrants’exclusion from host-dominated spaces, posited by place stratification theory, isonly weakly supported, as we find that migrants from less affluent countries accu-mulate disadvantage over time, likely due to discrimination in both the labor andhousing markets. Our findings also underscore the need for new theories explain-ing migrant residential outcomes which apply to contexts where migrant-denseneighborhoods are still forming.

Objectives: The study aims to make use of individual data to estimate the impact on premature mortality due to both existing commuter bicycling and the potential impact due to increased physical activity through shifting transport mode from car commuting to bicycling.

Methods: Using registry data on home and work addresses for the population of Stockholm County the shortest bicycling route on a network of bicycle paths and roads was retrieved. Travel survey data were used to establish current modes of commuting. The relation between duration of bicycling and distance bicycled within the general population in 2015 was established as a basis for identifying individuals that currently drive a car to work but were estimated to have the physical capacity to bicycle to work within 30 min. Within this mode-shift scenario from car-to-bike the duration of bicycling per week was estimated, both among current and potential bicycle commuters. The health impact assessment (HIA) on mortality due to bicycle commuting physical activity was estimated using the same relative risk as within the WHO Health Economic Assessment Tool.

Results: The current number of bicycle commuters were 53 000, and the scenario estimated an additional 111 000. Their mean bicycle distances were 4.5 and 3.4 km, respectively. On average these respective amounts of physical activity reduced the yearly mortality by 16% and 12%, resulting in 11.3 and 16.2 fewer preterm deaths per year.

Conclusion: The HIA of transferring commuting by car to bicycle estimated large health benefits due to increased physical activity.

This article presents the construction and outcomes of scenarios modeling commuter modal shift from car trips to cycling in the metropolitan region of Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. Building and improving upon previous studies in terms of both methodological approach and degree of spatial resolution of the modeling output, we examine scenarios where car commuters able to reach their workplace within 30 and 50 minutes of cycling shift commuting mode. Overall, car–bicycle modal shift figures were 31.6% and 48.7%, respectively. However, there were considerable geographical differences. While a substantial number of new bicycle commuters appeared in all five macro-level subdivisions of the study area, relative modal shift was by far the highest among car commuters living in the Inner City and its immediate surroundings.

This study aims to use dispersion-modeled concentrations of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and black carbon (BC) to estimate bicyclist exposures along a network of roads and bicycle paths. Such modeling was also performed in a scenario with increased bicycling. Accumulated concentrations between home and work were thereafter calculated for both bicyclists and drivers of cars. A transport model was used to estimate traffic volumes and current commuting preferences in Stockholm County. The study used individuals' home and work addresses, their age, sex, and an empirical model estimate of their expected physical capacity in order to establish realistic bicycle travel distances. If car commuters with estimated physical capacity to bicycle to their workplace within 30 min changed their mode of transport to bicycle, >110,000 additional bicyclists would be achieved. Time-weighted mean concentrations along paths were, among current bicyclists, reduced from 25.8 to 24.2 mu g/m(3) for NOx and 1.14 to 1.08 mu g/m(3) for BC. Among the additional bicyclists, the yearly mean NOx dose from commuting increased from 0.08 to 1.03 mu g/m(3). This would be expected to yearly cause 0.10 fewer deaths for current bicycling levels and 1.7 more deaths for additional bicycling. This increased air pollution impact is much smaller than the decrease in the total population.

Our study is based on individual data on people's home and work addresses, as well as their age, sex and physical capacity, in order to establish realistic bicycle-travel distances. A transport model is used to single out data on commuting preferences in the County Stockholm. Our analysis shows there is a very large potential for reducing emissions and exposure if all car drivers living within a distance corresponding to a maximum of a 30 min bicycle ride to work would change to commuting by bicycle. It would result in > 111,000 new cyclists, corresponding to an increase of 209% compared to the current situation.

Mean population exposure would be reduced by about 7% for both NO_x and black carbon (BC) in the most densely populated area of the inner city of Stockholm. Applying a relative risk for NO_x of 8% decrease in all-cause mortality associated with a 10 μg m^− 3decrease in NO_x, this corresponds to > 449 (95% CI: 340–558) years of life saved annually for the Stockholm county area with 2.1 million inhabitants. This is more than double the effect of the reduced mortality estimated for the introduction of congestion charge in Stockholm in 2006. Using NO₂ or BC as indicator of health impacts, we obtain 395 (95% CI: 172–617) and 185 (95% CI: 158–209) years of life saved for the population, respectively. The calculated exposure of BC and its corresponding impacts on mortality are likely underestimated. With this in mind the estimates using NO_x, NO₂ and BC show quite similar health impacts considering the 95% confidence intervals.

This study aims to develop a typology of generic meeting places based on social contact and mixing of relevance for infectious disease transmission. Data was collected by means of a contact diary survey conducted on a representative sample of the Swedish population. The typology is derived from a cluster analysis accounting for four dimensions associated with transmission risk: visit propensity and its characteristics in terms of duration, number of other persons present and likelihood of physical contact. In the analysis, we also study demographic, socioeconomic and geographical differences in the propensity of visiting meeting places. The typology identifies the family venue, the fixed activity site, the family vehicle, the trading plaza and the social network hub as generic meeting places. The meeting place typology represents a spatially explicit account of social contact and mixing relevant to infectious disease modelling where the social context of the outbreak can be highlighted in light of the actual infectious disease.