Metropolitan Area Of Milan Research Articles

Assessing the short term impact of air pollution on mortality: a matching approach

BackgroundThe opportunity to assess short term impact of air pollution relies on the causal interpretation of the exposure-response association. However, up to now few studies explicitly faced this issue within a causal inference framework. In this paper, we reformulated the problem of assessing the short term impact of air pollution on health using the potential outcome approach to causal inference. We considered the impact of high daily levels of particulate matter ≤10 μm in diameter (PM10) on mortality within two days from the exposure in the metropolitan area of Milan (Italy), during the period 2003–2006. Our research focus was the causal impact of a hypothetical intervention setting daily air pollution levels under a pre-fixed threshold.MethodsWe applied a matching procedure based on propensity score to estimate the total number of attributable deaths (AD) during the study period. After defining the number of attributable deaths in terms of difference between potential outcomes, we used the estimated propensity score to match each high exposure day, namely each day with a level of exposure higher than 40 μg/m3, with a day with similar background characteristics but a level of exposure lower than 40 μg/m3. Then, we estimated the impact by comparing mortality between matched days.ResultsDuring the study period daily exposures larger than 40 μg/m3 were responsible for 1079 deaths (90% CI: 116; 2042). The impact was more evident among the elderly than in the younger age classes. Exposures ≥ 40 μg/m3 were responsible, among the elderly, for 1102 deaths (90% CI: 388, 1816), of which 797 from cardiovascular causes and 243 from respiratory causes. Clear evidence of an impact on respiratory mortality was found also in the age class 65–74, with 87 AD (90% CI: 11, 163).ConclusionsThe propensity score matching turned out to be an appealing method to assess historical impacts in this field, which guarantees that the estimated total number of AD can be derived directly as sum of either age-specific or cause-specific AD, unlike the standard model-based procedure. For this reason, it is a promising approach to perform surveillance focusing on very specific causes of death or diseases, or on susceptible subpopulations. Finally, the propensity score matching is free from issues concerning the exposure-confounders-mortality modeling and does not involve extrapolation. On the one hand this enhances the internal validity of our results; on the other, it makes the approach scarcely appropriate for estimating future impacts.

Developing an algorithm based on health and social sources to stratify general population in different levels of health, socio-sanitary frailty and disability

to describe an innovative algorithm to classify the general population, in homogeneous groups of severity and complexity of disease and real needs, by using three dimensions: health, frailty, and disability. retrospective cohort study. the study includes the population covered by the Agency for health protection of Metropolitan Area of Milan (3,4 million of habitants). We identified two cohorts of residents: the first at 01.01.2015 and the second at 01.01.2016, classified in four different and mutually exclusive groups based on health and social data of the previous year. we estimated prevalence by age of the four main groups and we studied the transition, observed among groups, from 2015 to 2016. The algorithm validation was performed using non-conditional logistic regression+R14 models to estimate the association with total mortality with increasing levels of severity through the odds ratio (OR) and corresponding 95% confidence intervals (95%CI). The model performance, i.e., its predictive power and calibration, was evaluated by means of C-index and Hosmer-Lemeshow test, respectively. a total of 19% of subjects is healthy (group A); 41.6% has non-specific access to the health regional system (group B); 17% is a vulnerable (group C); and 22% has a chronic condition (group D). Combining chronic conditions with the frailty level, we classified population into subgroups. The risk of death within a year increases linearly in relation with increasing complexity of the health category and frailty level, with a grow of estimates from 0.83 to 135.6, using the healthy subjects as reference. The evaluation of the overall predictive power of the model, calculated by the C-index, shows a value of 0.94. The calibration of the model evaluated using the Hosmer-Lemeshow test returns a value of 327.2 (χ2 8 df, p-value <0.0001), underestimating the expected in the first three deciles and overestimating in the last deciles. the algorithm classify general population in homogeneous groups allowing to develop taking care models allocating health resources based on the real needs of patients.

SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF URBANIZATION PATTERNS: THE CASE OF LAND USE AND POPULATION DENSITY IN THE MILAN METROPOLITAN AREA

Efficiency in the provision of some large‐scale services motivates the administrative coordination of the urban functions at a more aggregate level. In Italy, the Metropolitan City (MC) has recently been introduced as an effective intermediate level between the region and the municipalities, to accommodate the integrated management of urban functions characterized by a broad spatial scope. The case of the Milan MC provides an opportunity for reflection on the extent to which the MC design should be envisioned, considering the urban morphology of an area. We analyze the patterns of urbanization, measured with population density and the share of urbanized area, considering the territories of the enlarged Milan metropolitan area, which includes the MC municipalities and of a contiguous province. The area under study can be considered a spatial continuum in which urbanization is markedly shaped by a core‐periphery pattern. We conclude that the MC design should have included all of the territories of the enlarged Milan metropolitan area, which are clearly interconnected with the Milan economy.

Hydro-geochemical characterization of Milan-Po Plain Area

Despite the aquifers in the Milan metropolitan area are a valuable groundwater resource for a large population (1,336,364 inhabitants in the Milan Municipality; 3,195,629 in the metropolitan area, data at November 2014) and a highly industrialized area, a hydro-geochemical characterization is still missing. In this study, we perform a hydrochemical analysis of the groundwater in the Milan metropolitan area through concentration maps, probability plots and concentration versus depth plots for some major ions (Ca2+, Na+, Cl-, SiO2), trace elements (As, Fe, Mn) and for two common contaminants (NO3- and SO42-) usually deriving from a mixture of point, multipoint and diffuse sources such as leaky sewers, coal gasification work, landfill leachate, septic effluent, house building and recreational areas. In order to attain this characterization, we built a complete and reliable geodatabase concerning the physical and chemical characteristics of the groundwater, starting from multiple different datasets. This database (covering the period 1983-2014) has been explored by classical and multivariate statistical analyses to provide relationships among the more influential lithological, hydrogeological and hydrochemical variables associated to the presence of specific elements and contaminants. The interaction between the phreatic aquifer and the semi-confined/confined aquifer has been also analysed.

Urban green infrastructure and urban forests: a case study of the Metropolitan Area of Milan

Rapid expansion of urban built-up areas since the 1950s has led to the Milan region becoming one of the major metropolitan areas of Europe. This has been accompanied by significant structural changes to urban and peri-urban landscapes and fragmentation of formerly contiguous green corridors by the distribution of new urban forms such as housing and transport infrastructure. The need to address the loss of green space was first recognised by policy-makers at the end of the 1970s and in due course, this has led to new policies and laws. These policies included the introduction of the Milan metropolitan parks approach that, nowadays, is represented by numerous urban forests that have become the backbone of green infrastructure (GI) creation and management. In the last decades, a total of 10 000 hectares of new forests and green systems have been created. Boscoincittà and Parco Nord Milano are the best known examples of this approach aimed to redevelop the neighbourhoods of some suburbs of Milan to create multifunctional green spaces (forests, grasslands, wetlands, river corridor, and allotment gardens) in lands previously industrial or uncultivated. The creation and management of urban forests has become the backbone of GI creation and management in the Metropolitan Area of Milan. In recent decades, trends of land use change have been characterised by a rapid decrease in natural and agricultural areas and an increase in artificial and urban structures. Although the phenomenon is growing rapidly in this area, there is evidence of an opposite social and environmental trend highlighting the importance of GI positively affecting urban quality of life. Recent policies and management plans are dealing with this evidence by turning their attention to expanding green areas and infrastructure. The purpose of our investigation is to revisit effective measures designed to increase the quality and quantity of UGI in the metropolitan region under study. To this end, we assessed land use changes and described the potentialities and impacts of policies on such phenomena. The study analyses the main elements of UGI in the Italian context within the framework of the European Union Life + project called Emonfur, a research programme involving, inter alia, the establishment of an Urban Forest inventory and impact analysis of ecosystem services in the Metropolitan Area of Milan. Our research has allowed us to determine the current status of key sites by monitoring the policy and planning decisions that resulted in their development. We believe that such an analysis can pave the way to understand future land-use dynamics not only in northern Italy but in other metropolitan territories as well.

Understanding resident mobility in Milan through independent component analysis of Telecom Italia mobile usage data

We consider an urban planning application where Telecom Italia collected mobile-phone traffic data in the metropolitan area of Milan, Italy, aiming to retrieve meaningful information regarding working, residential, and mobility activities around the city. The independent component analysis (ICA) framework is used to model underlying spatial activities as spatial processes on a lattice independent of each other. To incorporate spatial dependence within the spatial sources, we develop a spatial colored ICA (scICA) method. The method models spatial dependence within each source in the frequency domain, exploiting the power of Whittle likelihood and local linear log-spectral density estimation. An iterative algorithm is derived to estimate the model parameters through maximum Whittle likelihood. We then apply scICA to the Italian mobile traffic application.

Exploring Land Use Scenarios in Metropolitan Areas: Food Balance in a Local Agricultural System by Using a Multi-objective Optimization Model

Abstract The assessment of sustainability of agro-food systems is based on different and several tools. However, economic and policy implications of structural changes, such as land use change, and other modifications, for instance a different orientation or farming technique, could be mainly determined through scenario analysis. Especially in metropolitan regions, where the agricultural sector is threatened by various different pressures, a food supply adequately respondent to the demand is needed. In this sense the paper proposes the utilization of mathematical programming to assess some possible scenarios related to a higher compliance between food supply and demand. The approach is based on a linear programming model that takes into account the production and consumption dimensions in the Milan Metropolitan Area. Five scenarios are simulated, with different levels of sustainability and compliance with demand, demonstrating the potentialities of the regional agro-food system in adapting and adjusting itself to such modifications.

Higher Pollution Episode Detection Using Image Classification Techniques

Image classification techniques have been applied to detect higher pollution episodes in modelled air pollution data. These techniques are widely used in video processing to find patterns in videos. An attempt for the first time has been made to apply these techniques by considering air pollution as continuous video frames as the spatio-temporal changes in the pollution are linked to its previous state of the atmosphere. The applicability of these techniques has been tested over Northern Italy to detect ozone pollution episodes in year 2004 using model simulated concentrations. The methods tested in this paper are pixel, block-based, histogram, pertinent pixel and twin-comparison method. While these techniques have some kind of merits and demerits, a modified pertinent pixel comparison algorithm has been proposed to detect pollution episodes. The proposed method has been validated to detect PM10 episodes over Milan metropolitan area during 2 months in 2008 and is able to detect PM10 episodic events as well as non-events. This method provides a single binary index that can be applied by the air quality modellers and decision makers to determine the pollution episode over a given domain.

Rejoinder to the discussion of “Analysis of Spatio-Temporal Mobile Phone Data: a Case Study in the Metropolitan Area of Milan”

The paper is the rejoinder to the discussion of “Analysis of Spatio-Temporal Mobile Phone Data: a Case Study in the Metropolitan Area of Milan”.

Discussion of “Analysis of spatio-temporal mobile phone data: a case study in the metropolitan area of Milan” by Piercesare Secchi, Simone Vantini and Valeria Vitelli

The paper under discussion is a very well-written and interesting piece of work by Secchi et al. (2015) dealing with spatio-temporal data on mobile phone use in the area of Milan. I congratulate the authors for such a stimulating and interesting paper. It clearly points out that Erlang data on mobile phone use contain a large amount of rich information. The paper is an excellent example of statistical analysis of Big Data. I discuss briefly two alternative ways of dimension reduction of spatio-temporal data and illustrate them with artificial data that has been simulated according to the scheme proposed by the authors.

Discussion of “analysis of spatio-temporal mobile phone data: a case study in the metropolitan area of Milan” by P. Secchi, S. Vantini, and V. Vitelli

We congratulate the authors on an interesting paper, and we are delighted to have the opportunity to comment on the paper. The authors have succesfully analyzed a large dataset with a complicated time and space structure and have obtained a dimension reduction via a spatio-temporal decomposition with clear interpretations. In order to achieve this, two algorithms from the recent litetature, treelet analysis and Voronoi tesselations, were combined in a ingenious way and accomodated to the present problem.

Discussion on the paper “Analysis of spatio-temporal mobile phone data: a case study in the metropolitan area of Milan” by P. Secchi, S. Vantini and V. Vitelli

Discussion on the paper “Analysis of spatio-temporal mobile phone data: a case study in the metropolitan area of Milan” by P. Secchi, S. Vantini and V. Vitelli

Discussion of the paper “analysis of spatio-temporal mobile phone data: a case study in the metropolitan area of Milan”

The authors are to be congratulated on a valuable and thought-provoking contribution on the analysis of geo-referenced high-dimensional data describing the use over time of the mobile-phone network in the urban area of Milan, Italy. This is a timely and world-wide problem that opens wide avenues for new methodological contributions. The authors develop a Bagging Voronoi Treelet Analysis which is a non-parametric method for the analysis of spatially dependent functional data. This approach integrates the treelet decomposition with a proper treatment of spatial dependence, obtained through a Bagging Voronoi strategy. In our discussion, we focus on the following points: (i) a mobre general form of the spatio-temporal model proposed in Secchi et al. (Stat Methods Appl, 2015), (ii) alternative methods to approach the smooth temporal functions, (iii) additional methods to reduce the problem of dimension for spatial dependence data, and (iv) comments on the pros and cons of the proposed pre-processing methodology.

Discussion of “Analysis of spatio-temporal mobile phone data: a case study in the metropolitan area of Milan”

We congratulate the authors for a very interesting and timely contribution to an important problem: using nonparametric functional data analysis methods for studying spatio-temporal observations with the aim to identify subregions in a spatial domain sharing similar patterns along time. The authors develop an efficient methodology to perform dimensional reduction of spatially dependent functional data based on treelet decompositions and an appropriate bagging Voronoi strategy that allows them to take into account the spatial dependency in the analysed data. Treelets were first introduced in Lee and Nadler (2007) and Lee et al. (2008) as a multi-scale basis that extends wavelets to unordered data. The method is fully adaptive. It returns orthonormal basis functions supported on nested clusters in a hierarchical tree. Unlike other hierarchical methods, the basis and the tree structure are computed simultaneously, and both reflect the internal structure of the data. Combination of treelets with a bagging Voronoi strategy for identifying subregions with similar patterns along time introduces numerical challenges that are efficiently tackled by the authors.

Protection of Peri-Urban Open Spaces and Food-System Strategies. The Case of Parco delle Risaie in Milan

Food-system planning is a planning approach focused on the elements that are directly or indirectly involved in food production, including the effects of these processes on territories and cities. A strategy for protecting peri-urban green areas aligned with the food-system planning approach is being adopted in the metropolitan area of Milan, in Parco delle Risaie. This article outlines the planning process underlying the establishment of Parco delle Risaie, where peri-urban space protection strategies have been integrated with food-system planning strategies, such as the creation of a local food chain and the promotion of multifunctional farming activities.

Pulmonary and intestinal parasites in colony cats as markers for biodiversity in an urban area

Urban colony cats are part of the vertebrate community in urban ecosystems in the metropolitan area of Milan, Lombardy, Italy (45° 27′ N, 9° 11′ E) their management is mainly based on the practice of their capture/sterilization/release. Aims of this research, performed from May 2013 to March 2014, were to determine the qualitative and quantitative composition of endoparasitic infections in urban colony cats, the spatial distribution of infected colony cats, and the likelihood that parasites of colony cats act as markers for biodiversity in an urban ecosystem. Pulmonary and intestinal parasites were detected in feces of 35.92 % of colony cats specifically, four intestinal nematodes (Toxocara cati, Toxascaris leonina, Ancylostomatidae and Trichuris vulpis), two intestinal cestodes (Dipylidium caninum and Spirometra sp.), one intestinal protozoan (Cystoisospora sp.) and one pulmonary nematode (Aelurostrongylus abstrusus) were isolated. Infected and non-infected colony cats did not show any statistically significant difference as to their distances from the center of the city. However, in urban colony cats infected and non-infected by A. abstrusus, in cats infected and non-infected by parasites presenting an indirect life cycle (ILC) and in cats with or without multiparasitic infections were detected appreciable differences in their distances from the edges of the nearest green urban areas having different sizes. For A. abstrusus, parasites with an indirect life cycle (ILC), and multiparasitic infections, significant differences in distance from green urban areas were detected for infected vs. non-infected urban colony cats particularly, shorter distances for infected cats were observed, suggesting that cats living closer to green urban areas with higher biodiversity were more likely to be infected.

The Effect of the Country of Birth of the Owner on Business Survival. Evidence from Milan Metropolitan Area, Italy

This paper presents a large scale and longitudinal analysis of business survival patterns in Milan (Italy), which is based on data drawn from the business registers. It examines the role played by the country of birth of the entrepreneur in explaining business longevity. The study controls, by means of coarsened exact matching, for a set of individual, firm and context variables that have been found to impact on firm survival prospects. They include attributes of the owner (age and gender) and contextual conditions (industry and year of the start-up). Results suggest that, all other individual and environmental factors being equal, migrant-owned firms generally have better survival prospects than their native-owned counterparts. More in detail, compared to Italian-owned firms, business run by individuals born in Egypt, Morocco, Peru and Albania display significantly lower failure rates; only Chinese-owned firms are less likely to endure. Implications of the findings are discussed.

‘Engage me in taking care of my heart’: a grounded theory study on patient–cardiologist relationship in the hospital management of heart failure

ObjectiveIn approaching the study and practice of heart failure (HF) management, authors recognise that the patient–doctor relationship has a central role in engaging patients in their care. This study aims...

“Words to receive. Words to be received”: reflections on the Intercultural City museum work

Although diversity has always been a fundamental characteristic of human societies, now more than ever it has become central to the political and research agenda. The question of how we can live together while enjoying our differences is a fundamental issue of our time, and the city is viewed as the most promising site to negotiate identities. That being so, what is the role of museums? How can local museums develop interventions that address local cultural diversity issues? In the first part of the article, I introduce the idea of “Intercultural City museum work.” I present a metadesign framework that aims to help museums emphasize the impact of diversity work on their local contexts, proposing the Intercultural City approach as a reference point. In the second part of the article, I describe the “Intercultural City museum work” and on using the metadesign framework with reference to MUST-Museo del Territorio Vimercatese, a civic museum on local history and identity in Vimercate, a town in the metropolitan area of Milan. Immigration to the geographical area over the past few decades and the resulting cultural diversity are neither reflected in the museum collections nor the permanent exhibitions. As a result, the museum decided to address these topics through services, events and special projects. In particular, I describe the exhibition Words to Receive. Words to be Received, designed and created by COI-Centro Orientamento Immigrati—a local immigrants’ resource centre—with the museum.

Design and Scale Isses in the New Metropolitan City: a study of the south-east homogeneous zone

The establishment of the new Metropolitan City and recent anti-sprawl legislations form part of a new urban regeneration initiative. In this context, the goal of the current research is to provide spatial forecasts, guidelines for governance , and economic feasibility scenarios for revitalisation work. The research is centred on the Milan Metropolitan area. In addition to exploring certain theories of regeneration and resilience, this paper reinstates the practice of spatial analysis of abandoned industrial areas at a metropolitan scale and identifies boundaries, environments, and issues for meta-design testing based on public initiatives aimed at increasing socio-economic resilience for the south-east sector of the Milanese metropolitan area.