Healthy Cities Emerge: Toronto–Ottawa–Copenhagen

Abstract

The concept of a healthy city is hardly a new one. The currents of modern urban public health that began in the industrializing cities of England and spread across Europe and the United States in the mid- to late nineteenth century soon came to Canada. Toronto’s Board of Health was established in 1884 and in the early part of the twentieth century Toronto’s Department of Public Health became internationally renowned. This public health leadership was revived in the late 1970s with the Board of Health’s report Public Health in the 1980’s, a sort of municipal Lalonde Report.

The Department’s new mission was ‘to make Toronto the healthiest city in North America’, which raised several interesting questions: What is a healthy city, how would we get one, and how would we know we had got one? A 1984 conference on healthy public policy, marking—among other things—the Board of Health’s centennial, also was used to begin to explore the idea of a Healthy City. This led to a 1988 report, Healthy Toronto 2000, that was one of the first Healthy City plans of the modern era of healthy cities.

The ideas at the 1984 Beyond Health Care conference provided the impetus for Ilona Kickbusch to launch the European Healthy Cities project, and the rest, as they say, is history!