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The Healthy Cities/Communities Movement: The Global Diffusion of Local Initiatives

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Community Intervention

Part of the book series: Clinical Sociology: Research and Practice ((CSRP))

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Abstract

The Healthy Cities/Communities Movement (HC/CM) seeks to improve health and the quality of life through a series of interventions that bring a community together to create multi-sector partnerships that set priorities, establish new public health policy and implement programs to improve the health of the population. Although “Healthy Cities” is an old concept, it reemerged in the mid-1980s during an International Conference on Health Promotion in Toronto, Canada. It was quickly supported by the World Health Organization’s European office which created 34 Healthy Cities initiatives over the next few years. The movement then spread to the US in the late 1980s and subsequently has gone global. The World Heath Organization (WHO) and others have created a set of tools to build coalitions, develop plans, gain municipal approval and secure funding for local HC/CM programs. They recommend that the effort should be citizen driven and feature collaborative problem solving. Liverpool, England (United Kingdom) took a top-down approach while Udine, Italy is an example of a grassroots bottom-up approach. WHO recommends the Monitoring, Accountability, Reporting, and Impact assessment (MARI) framework, while US projects tend to employ the Logic Model to guide the project evaluation. Most published evaluations have been case studies, but the California Healthy Cities Project conducted a multi-site comparative evaluation of 20 communities. This evaluation sheds light on differences and similarities among projects that vary by community size and sponsoring organization.

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  1. Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

    Harry Perlstadt

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  1. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

    Jan Marie Fritz

  2. Université du Québec a Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Jacques Rhéaume

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Perlstadt, H. (2014). The Healthy Cities/Communities Movement: The Global Diffusion of Local Initiatives. In: Fritz, J., Rhéaume, J. (eds) Community Intervention. Clinical Sociology: Research and Practice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0998-8_6

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