[Sustainable Urban Health as a conceptual and action approach]

The field of urban health, i.e., the application of public health for people in the city, is oriented towards both scientific knowledge and practical action. In the international arena, a scientific infrastructure exists for this purpose. Despite the common roots of public health and urban planning in Germany, the connection between these fields of work was not very apparent for a long time. Legal requirements for the participation of public health service in (urban) planning processes have had little impact so far. The aim of this study was to connect to international urban health developments in order to make the topic more visible, to support professional exchange and to give impulses for research and practice. To express the close links between human health, ecological stability and social justice, the approach was conceived as sustainable urban health. With this in mind, the program "City of the Future - Healthy, Sustainable Metropolises" was initiated in 2011.This article characterizes the basic approach as integrating and describes the underlying guiding principles, i.e., "View field expansion" as an epistemological principle and "Bridge building" as an action-guiding principle, and outlines the details. The spectrum of topics ranges from medical and nursing care over "classical" prevention and health promotion to health in all policies. Within this approach, "smaller" tasks can be pursued, e.g., an overview of local health actions and actors, networking promotion, or preserving significant developments in collective memory. At the same time, it is about contributions to the solution of "big" tasks, e.g., the derivation of conclusions from the Corona learning experience, a more consistent implementation of health in all policies, or transformation steps towards an ecologically sustainable development of society. Legal norms, public health services, health reporting, and urban planning come up as leitmotifs. The article also outlines the genesis of the position papers in this supplementary volume and concludes with an outlook.