Healthy City - Approaches

Approaches

Many jurisdictions have healthy community programmes and cities can apply to become a WHO-designated "Healthy City". WHO defines the Healthy City as:

"one that is continually creating and improving those physical and social environments and expanding those community resources which enable people to mutually support each other in performing all the functions of life and in developing to their maximum potential."

Measuring the indices required, establishing standards and determining the impact of each component on health is difficult. In some regions, such as Europe, a health impact assessment is a required piece of public policy development.

There are many networks of healthy cities, including in Europe and internationally, such as the Alliance for Healthy Cities. A key feature is ensuring that the social determinants of health are taken into consideration in urban design and urban governance. For example, "urbanization and health" was the theme of the 2010 World Health Day. One tool in developing healthy cities is social entrepreneurship.

Read more about this topic:  Healthy City

Famous quotes containing the word approaches:

    Bloody men are like bloody buses—
    You wait for about a year
    And as soon as one approaches your stop
    Two or three others appear.
    Wendy Cope (b. 1945)

    As the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into Silence. Silence is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places. She is when we hear inwardly, sound when we hear outwardly. Creation has not displaced her, but is her visible framework and foil. All sounds are her servants, and purveyors, proclaiming not only that their mistress is, but is a rare mistress, and earnestly to be sought after.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.
    Arthur Miller (b. 1915)