European Healthy City Network Phase V: Patterns emerging for healthy urban planning

© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. There is a tradition of planning cities and their infrastructure to successfully tackle communicable disease arising from urban development. Non-communicable disease follows a different course. Development brings in its wake a basket of adverse health and health equity outcomes that are proving difficult to tackle. In response, within Phase V of the European Healthy Cities Network, municipalities have implemented a range of policy and physical interventions using a settings approach. Owing to the time lag between physical interventions and health outcomes, this research interrogates city activity itself to develop better understanding. Self-reported city case studies and questionnaire data were analysed to reveal patterns using an inductive approach. Findings indicate that some categories of intervention, such as whole city planning and transport, have a systemic impact across the wider determinants of health. Addressing transferability and stakeholder understanding helped cities create conditions for successful outcomes. Cities had varying urban development approaches for tackling climate change. Improvements to current practice are discussed, including; a distinction between supply side and demand side in healthy urban planning; valuing co-benefits and developing integrative approaches to the evidence-base. This evaluative article is important for cities wanting to learn how to maximize benefits to public health through urban development and for researchers exploring, with a systemic approach, the experiences of European cities acting at the interface of urban development and public health. This article also provides recommendations for future phases of the WHO European Healthy Cities programme, posing questions to better address governance and equity in spatial planning