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Cities and Health from the Neolithic to the Anthropocene

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Healthy Cities

Abstract

This chapter positions the late-twentieth and twenty-first century Healthy Cities movement in history and provides a scholarly introduction to the book. It starts with a description of the interfaces between urbanization and health from the dawn of humanity, and leads the reader from paleo-epidemiological evidence on the relation between human ways of living and their health patterns through the birth of medicine in the Levant and classical Greece, and medieval prescriptions on architecture, aesthetics and health to what must be considered the cradle of modern urban health: the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. Both urban planning and public health as disciplines and fields of scholarly enterprise were established at the early genesis of the Anthropocene. Developments in both fields laid the groundwork for a more inspired value-based approach to urban health that culminated in the establishment of small Healthy Cities projects in large cities in the 1980s. The nature of these initiatives and the serendipity with other global developments is described, and the necessity of more systematic documentation and analysis of value-based urban health development outlined. The chapter ends with an outline of the three categories of parameters for the analysis and synthesis of the material in this book: research/policy/practice perspectives; values and the triggers for change.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Health Equity Training, Research & Evaluation (CHETRE), University of New South Wales, South Western Sydney Local Health District, Ingham Institute, Locked Bag 7103, Liverpool, BC, NSW 1871, Australia

    Evelyne de Leeuw

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  1. Evelyne de Leeuw
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Correspondence to Evelyne de Leeuw .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Health Equity Training, Research & Evaluation (CHETRE), University of New South Wales, South Western Sydney Local Health District, Ingham Institute, Liverpool, New South Wales, Australia

    Evelyne de Leeuw

  2. Institute of Global Health, University of Geneva, Campus Biotech, Geneva, Switzerland

    Jean Simos

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de Leeuw, E. (2017). Cities and Health from the Neolithic to the Anthropocene. In: de Leeuw, E., Simos, J. (eds) Healthy Cities. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6694-3_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6694-3_1

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