Healthy
cities (or smaller municipalities as well) are safe living environments, which
offer possibilities for balanced and sustainable living conditions contributing
to the well-being of their inhabitants.   Making a city a healthy living environment
does not happen overnight, but is a project of decades.

All cities
are not equal as to their environment. 
In some environments making the city a healthy one can be rather challenging.  Extreme weather conditions and natural
characteristics such as earthquake danger, polluted soil or water, can make a
city vulnerable and hard to design, build and maintain. Some current cities
also nowadays carry historical burdens with them, such as lasting political
conflicts, which makes their development work difficult.

Healthy
cities motivate their inhabitants to lead a healthy living.  In such cities, pollution is pressed to a
minimum through effective infrastructure. 
Infrastructure services like transportation, energy, telecommunication
and waste management are taken care of in an efficient way.  

A healthy
city is not just a technical accomplishment. 
Healthy cities offer their inhabitants incentives for healthy and friendly
social life, which leads to social and societal health of the city and its
inhabitants.   Services such as health
care, multi-level education and security belong to the picture.  As well healthy cities offer cultural
encounters, and feed multicultural and liberal environment, where all human
freedoms are fully implemented. Cities are of course also places where
commercial offerings are expected to be rich and multifaceted.

Sadly,
healthy cities are hard to find.  The
perfect city is not yet there.  Work on
healthy cities development must be intensified. 
This presentation further discusses the concept of a healthy city, and
sketches ways to proceed in the road towards increasingly more people living in
healthy cities.