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

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.

Urban planning for healthy cities. A review of the progress of the European Healthy Cities Programme.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the progress made by European cities in relation to Healthy Urban Planning (HUP) during Phase IV of the World Health Organization's Healthy Cities programme (2003-2008). The introduction sets out the general principle of HUP, identifying three levels or phases of health and planning integration. This leads on to a more specific analysis of the processes and substance of HUP, which provide criteria for assessment of progress. The assessment itself relies on two sources of data provided by the municipalities: the Annual Review Templates (ARTs) 2008 and the response to the Phase IV General Evaluation Questionnaire. The findings indicate that the evidence from different sources and questions in different sections are encouragingly consistent. The number of cities achieving a good level of understanding and activity in HUP has risen very substantially over the period. In particular, those achieving effective strategic integration of health and planning have increased. A key challenge for the future will be to develop planning frameworks which advance public health concerns in a spatial policy context driven often by market forces. A health in all policies approach could be valuable.

Production et commerce de l' alcool : conséquences pour la santé publique / Brendan Walsh et Marcus Grant

Cet ouvrage décrit une analyse détaillée des statistiques relatives à la production et à la consommation des boisson alcooliques, dont le but est de tirer les conclusions qui s'imposent en matière de santé publique. Les statistiques, qui sont tirées de divers rapports officiels de statistiques et autres publications sur le commerce international, sont présentées séparément pour la bière, le vin et les spiritueux, la conclusion concernant l'ensemble des boissons alcooliques. Entre autres observations, les auteurs concluent que l'association entre la consommation d'alcool et les problèmes liés à l'alcool est suffisamment nette pour que l'on soit en droit de voir dans la production d'alcool une activité qui a inévitablement des répercussions sur la santé publique

Public health implications of alcohol production and trade / Brendan Walsh and Marcus Grant

Presents a detailed analysis of data on the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages in an effort to formulate conclusions concerning the impact of recent trends on public health. Data, which were drawn from a variety of official international statistical reports and trade publications, are presented separately for beer, wine, and distilled spirits, with a concluding section on alcoholic beverages as a whole. Among the many observations that emerge, the book concludes that the association between trends in alcohol consumption and trends in alcohol-related problems is sufficiently strong to justify the view that alcohol production is an activity with inevitable implications for public health