Healthy Communities

The Healthy Communities or Healthy Cities movement emerged in the mid-1980s, inspired by Leonard Duhl, a U.S. doctor who spent many years in public health and who consulted for the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF. It was first implemented by Trevor Hancock, an English-born Canadian doctor, also in the field of public health, who went on to organize “Healthy Toronto 2000.” His efforts caught the attention of WHO, which subsequently launched similar efforts in thirty-four European cities. Since that time, the movement has spread to more than three thousand communities in more than fifty countries on every continent.

Healthy Community initiatives are typically multisectoral partnerships focusing on improving the physical and mental health of community members. Improving population health, however, often entails improving the health of the community itself. In the words of one spokesman, “What builds health, it turns out, also builds community, safety, wealth, and families. The health of a community grows from how many children people have, in what kind of families, with how much money and education, from a sense of choice, and from friends and family who give life meaning, from clean water and air, and basic medicine, from families who eat well, are well housed, secure from crime, and not deranged by drugs or alcohol” (Flower 1996).

WHO's Healthy Cities efforts have grown to include twenty-three national networks in Europe, North America, and Australia. Over twenty-five state partnerships are active in the United States. Thousands of independent initiatives exist globally, most of which are found in the developing world. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; and Ontario, Canada, are among the North American cities that have undertaken the Healthy Cities approach, but areas as diverse as Horsens (in Denmark) and Cali (in Colombia) have also adopted the idea.