Features of public open spaces and physical activity among children : findings from the CLAN study

Objective : To examine associations between features of public open spaces, and children's physical activity.
Participants : 163 children aged 8–9 years and 334 adolescents aged 13–15 years from Melbourne, Australia participated in 2004.
Methods : A Geographic Information System was used to identify all public open spaces (POS) within 800 m of participants' homes and their closest POS. The features of all POS identified were audited in 2004/5. Accelerometers measured moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) after school and on weekends. Linear regression analyses examined associations between features of the closest POS and participants' MVPA.
Results : Most participants had a POS within 800 m of their home. The presence of playgrounds was positively associated with younger boys' weekend MVPA (B = 24.9 min/day; p ≤ 0.05), and lighting along paths was inversely associated with weekend MVPA (B = − 54.9 min/day; p ≤ 0.05). The number of recreational facilities was inversely associated with younger girls' MVPA after school (B = − 2.6 min/day; p ≤ 0.05) and on the weekend (B = − 8.7 min/day; p ≤ 0.05). The presence of trees providing shade (5.8 min/day, p ≤ 0.01) and signage regarding dogs (B = 6.8 min/day, p ≤ 0.05) were positively associated with adolescent girls' MVPA after school.
Conclusion : Certain features of POS were associated with participants' MVPA, although mixed associations were evident. Further research is required to clarify these complex relationships.

Do features of public open spaces vary according to neighbourhood socio-economic status?

This study examined the relations between neighbourhood socio-economic status and features of public open spaces (POS) hypothesised to influence children's physical activity. Data were from the first follow-up of the Children Living in Active Neighbourhoods (CLAN) Study, which involved 540 families of 5–6 and 10–12-year-old children in Melbourne, Australia. The Socio-Economic Index for Areas Index (SEIFA) of Relative Socio-economic Advantage/Disadvantage was used to assign a socioeconomic index score to each child's neighbourhood, based on postcode. Participant addresses were geocoded using a Geographic Information System. The Open Space 2002 spatial data set was used to identify all POS within an 800 m radius of each participant's home. The features of each of these POS (1497) were audited. Variability of POS features was examined across quintiles of neighbourhood SEIFA. Compared with POS in lower socioeconomic neighbourhoods, POS in the highest socioeconomic neighbourhoods had more amenities (e.g. picnic tables and drink fountains) and were more likely to have trees that provided shade, a water feature (e.g. pond, creek), walking and cycling paths, lighting, signage regarding dog access and signage restricting other activities. There were no differences across neighbourhoods in the number of playgrounds or the number of recreation facilities (e.g. number of sports catered for on courts and ovals, the presence of other facilities such as athletics tracks, skateboarding facility and swimming pool). This study suggests that POS in high socioeconomic neighbourhoods possess more features that are likely to promote physical activity amongst children.

Bureaucratic, corporate/market and network governance : shifting spaces for gender equity in education

Education as a field of policy, research and practice has been reconfigured over four decades by economic, social and cultural globalization in conjuncture with neoliberal policies premised upon markets and new managerialism. One effect has been shifting boundaries between, and understandings of what constitutes the public and the private with regard to the role of the state vis-á-vis the formation of gendered subjectivities and civil society and the gendering of public– private relations in and between family and work. Drawing on feminist readings of Bourdieu and critical policy sociology, I consider the implications of a move from bureaucratic educational governance framed by state welfarism to corporate or market governance framed by the post-welfare state, and consider whether particular constructions of globalization and corporate/market governance lead to network governance. Network governance, it is argued, is premised on new forms of sociality and institutional reconfigurations of knowledge-based economies and a spatialized state that coordinates rather than regulates multiple public– private providers. The question is how each mode of governance frames various possibilities and problems for gender equity in education.

Semi-hyperbolic mappings in Banach spaces

The definition of semi-hyperbolic dynamical systems generated by Lipschitz continuous and not necessarily invertible mappings in Banach spaces is presented in this thesis. Like hyperbolic mappings, they involve a splitting into stable and unstable spaces, but a slight leakage from the strict invariance of the spaces is possible and the unstable subspaces are assumed to be finite dimensional. Bi-shadowing is a combination of the concepts of shadowing and inverse shadowing and is usually used to compare pseudo-trajectories calculated by a computer with the true trajectories. In this thesis, the concept of bi-shadowing in a Banach space is defined and proved for semi-hyperbolic dynamical systems generated by Lipschitz mappings. As an application to the concept of bishadowing, linear delay differential equations are shown to be bi-shadowing with respect to pseudo-trajectories generated by nonlinear small perturbations of the linear delay equation. This shows robustness of solutions of the linear delay equation with respect to small nonlinear perturbations. Complicated dynamical behaviour is often a consequence of the expansivity of a dynamical system. Semi-hyperbolic dynamical systems generated by Lipschitz mappings on a Banach space are shown to be exponentially expansive, and explicit rates of expansion are determined. The result is applied to a nonsmooth noninvertible system generated by delay differential equation. It is shown that semi-hyperbolic mappings are locally φ-contracting, where -0 is the Hausdorff measure of noncompactness, and that a linear operator is semi-hyperbolic if and only if it is φ-contracting and has no spectral values on the unit circle. The definition of φ-bi-shadowing is given and it is shown that semi-hyperbolic mappings in Banach spaces are φ-bi-shadowing with respect to locally condensing continuous comparison mappings. The result is applied to linear delay differential equations of neutral type with nonsmooth perturbations. Finally, it is shown that a small delay perturbation of an ordinary differential equation with a homoclinic trajectory is ‘chaotic’.