Definition
A Healthy City is 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.
Introduction
Cities and health have gone together since the dawn of civilization (De Leeuw 2017). From the beginnings, the “yin and yang” of this bipole was a dynamic struggle between pathogenesis and salutogenesis (Antonovsky 1987). The modern “Healthy Cities movement” has roots in social systems for health and well-being and their interface with urban planning. It gained traction from the 1960s.
A strong belief emerged in the period of the Enlightenment that certain types of urban planning would be more beneficial to health (salutogenesis) and the prevention of disease (prevent pathogenesis) than others. Maneglier (1990) describes how Voltaire complains about the markets of Paris “established in...
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de Leeuw, E., Simos, J. (2022). Healthy Cities. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Futures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51812-7_281-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51812-7_281-1
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