Healthy urban planning in practice - experiences of cities in the Healthy Cities movement

Previous chapters underlined the links between health and urban planning, illustrating the value of the Healthy Cities approach and the importance of healthy urban planning. This chapter establishes a baseline for future work in this area. The WHO Healthy Cities project has existed since 1986 in Europe, but cities were first formally required to involve urban planners in this work in the third phase of the project (1998-2002). Healthy urban planning is a new area of work for the Healthy Cities movement, and WHO therefore carried out a survey of urban planners in the cities that are part of the WHO Healthy Cities network at the end of the second phase of the project (1993-1997) (51).