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Of the many problems which confront urban policy makers and planners at the present time, that of housing the lower income groups is one of the most general and the most pressing. The term “lower income groups” is used advisedly and not merely as a euphemism for “the poor” who live in “slums”. Housing quality covers a wide spectrum from the most luxurious to the most spartan and while on the whole it is closely related to the current income of the household, the association is not perfect. The level of income is of vital importance in achieving a given level of quality but the contraction of incomes towards the end of the lifespan of a household is not necessarily associated with a lowering of housing quality. Equally, the slum is a multi‐dimensional concept which though easy to recognise is difficult to define. Not all housing occupied by low paid workers are slums and not all slum‐dwellers are poor. The term “slum” often denotes a type of neighbourhood in which flourishes a sub‐culture containing its own socio‐economic stratification. The solution of low income housing problems is obviously closely bound up with the question of slums but neither begins nor ends with it. The purpose of this paper is to examine the causes of the housing market manifestations of the problems of urban blight or congestion from the economic point of view (i.e. to consider the operation of the market mechanism in allocating resources) and to suggest an approach to the formulation of policy which will achieve an economically efficient distribution of housing resources.

There is an on-going debate as to whether health is negatively affected by economic inequality. Still, we have limited knowledge of the mechanisms relating inequality to individual health and very little evidence comes from less-developed economies. We use individual and multi-level data from Zambia on child nutritional health to test three hypotheses consistent with a negative correlation between income inequality and population health: the absolute income hypothesis (AIH), the relative income hypothesis (RIH) and the income inequality hypothesis (IIH). The results confirm that absolute income positively affects health. For the RIH we find sensitivity to the reference group used. Most interestingly, we find higher income inequality to robustly associate with better child health. The same pattern appears in a cross country regression. To explain the conflicting results in the literature we suggest examining potential mediators such as generosity, food sharing, trust and purchasing power.

To examine some of the complex relationships that exist between sports work and mental health and illness.

This chapter draws upon prevalence data, athlete testimonies, and theoretical works to examine: (1) the prevalence of depression and suicide in professional sport and the wider society; (2) athlete experiences of depression and suicidal ideation, particularly among men; and (3) some of the key sociological ideas which might help to explain experiences of mental health and illness in professional sports work.

Although there are plentiful data on the societal prevalence of depression and suicide, increasing interest in the mental health of professional athletes (and other types of sports workers) has occurred largely in response to individual or clusters of often publicly known, sometimes high profile, cases rather than in response to systematic empirical grounded data. Athlete experiences of mental illness are shown to be related in complex ways to various constraints associated with their public and private lives, to the constraints of their interdependency networks, and to experiences of shame which can have a series of deleterious acute and chronic health costs.

Since much of what is currently known about the links between sports work and mental health and illness is derived from largely psychological studies and media-led or autobiographical accounts, more sociological research is needed to better understand the costs of mental health of working in often very public and highly pressurized, medicalized, scientized, and performance-focused performance sport settings.

Reviews the theory and principles of economic appraisal in redevelopment and rehabilitation/refurbishment. Explains some of the statistical research in housing and commercial office appraisals, including the results from computer simulations and sensitivity tests of the important methods of appraisal and analysis.