Healthy cities

WHO South-East Asia countries is hosting 750 million urban population with average of 34% of total population.  While urbanization offers many opportunities for employment and access to better public services, the rapid and unplanned growth also poses major health risks. In urban settings, determinants of heath are linked to social, demographic, economic and geographic factors that create complex vulnerabilities that affect health risk exposure, health behaviors, access to health care, and health status.  WHO recognizes cities as key operational partners to addressing health determinants and response to public health needs and essential services to the people, particularly the vulnerable groups. 

WHO Healthy city initiative 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.  Healthy city network and urban governance for health and wellbeing are strategic actions to synergize both approaches for multisectoral actions addressing health determinants and promote inclusive and equitable cites.  The initiative aimed to support countries to meet SDGs 3, 11 and 17 building partnership between health and development partners. 

Urban governance for health and wellbeing, one of the key domains of healthy city, is a systematic approach to tackle root causes of unhealthy conditions, fostering multisectoral actions, meaningful people participation and leaving no one behind. There is a need to advocate amongst policy makers to consider having an approach in the next generation of urban development planning for sustainable health and well-being. As this initiative also requires meaningful people participation, awareness for whole of society approach and addressing needs of diverse groups of populations is also required. 

Regional Laboratory on urban governance for health and wellbeing (UGHW) is a social laboratory that attempts to develop appropriate city models for health and wellbeing using integrated approach to advance urban governance from many initiatives in cities e.g. healthy city, smoke-free city, age-friendly city, child-friendly city, smart city, green city, etc. The initiative plans to support cities to demonstrate multisectoral mechanism within its structure and governance system to address social, economic, and environmental determinants of health.  Theory of Change will be developed for each city to transform visions promoting health equity and wellbeing through good governance, to actions.