Elio Trusiani

Urban Planning for Healthy European Cities

The connection between health, well-being, and the quality of living spaces is not accidental. The organization of the city and, in general, of social and environmental contexts, is capable of conditioning and modifying emerging needs, lifestyles, and individual expectations. Faced with scientific evidence for these relationships, it is necessary for urban planning to realize that there is no time left to hope that economic growth and demographic change, by themselves, will be able to generate conditions conducive to people’s quality of life. This invitation is energetically shared by the WHO’s Healthy Cities Movement. Through an interdisciplinary group that met between 2009 and 2011, the UCL–Lancet Commission developed a series of recommendations for policy makers to improve the urban environment and to open a discussion on the role that urban planning can play.