The Healthy Cities Project: a challenge for health education

The World Health Organization Healthy Cities Project assists participating cities in developing and implementing plans to create health promoting policies, programs, and environmental conditions. The project, which has its origins in the strategy of Health for All by Year 2000, seeks to bring the rhetoric down to earth and ground it in policy and practice. So far the project has been very successful in interesting and involving people at the local level. What began as a small European project in 1986 has become part of a global movement four years later. This movement is based on a recognition of the ecological context of health and the need to reconcile human lifestyles with their environmental and planetary impact. In the process of involving many people from nonmedical sectors in urban health promotion, the continuing relevance of health education to public health is becoming apparent. The challenge to Health Education is to broaden its perspective from the individual and biological, to the social and environmental if it is to play a full part in tackling the ecological crises which confront us.