Environmental Health Unit
Healthy Cities
This forward-looking resource recasts the concept of healthy cities not only as a safe, pleasant, and green built environment, but also one that creates and sustains health by addressing social, economic, and political conditions. It describes collaborations between city planning and public health, creating a contemporary concept of urban governance—a democratically informed process that embraces values like equity. Models, critiques, and global examples illustrate institutional change, community input, targeted assessment, and other means of addressing longstanding sources of urban health challenges. In these ambitious pages, healthy cities are rooted firmly in the worldwide movement toward balanced and sustainable urbanisation, developed not to disguise or displace entrenched health and social problems, but to encourage and foster solutions.
This research is integrated in several academic programmes, including the Master in Science of the Environment (MUSE) at the University of Geneva, in collaboration with the Faculties of Sciences, Sciences of Society and Law, and also the Master in Global Health (MSGH) of the IGH. Dr. Jean Simos and Dr. Nicola Cantoreggi teach the courses Health and Environment (in French) for the MUSE and Environment Health and Sustainable Development for the MSGH.