Building Healthy Communities

Health is important for the wellbeing of individuals and society, but a healthy population is also a prerequisite for economic productivity and prosperity. The Lisbon strategy underlines the importance of health as a key factor for economic growth. However there is a limited awareness of the contributions that a "healthy" urban policy can make to tackle challenges in health.

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The Building Healthy Communities (BHC) Thematic Network consists of a partnership of 10 cities from seven EU member states who will be working together over the next 30 months in order to capitalise knowledge and practices on urban factors influencing health and to create opportunities for cities to shape and implement healthy policies for their citizens.

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Project launch :
01 November 2008

Lead Partner

City of Torino luisa.avedano@comune.torino.it

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The city of Torino is the lead partner of the Building Healthy Communities network. Torino is located in the Piedmont region in the north of Italy and has a population of over 900 000 people. Torino has implemented the Urb-Health thematic network under the URBACT I Programme which focused on how to reduce health inequalities in urban transformation areas. The need of setting indicators and measurement procedures of impact is one of the achievements of the above mentioned network which has to be seen in the framework of a wider mandate on quality of life and healthy community creation.

Torino is interested in further exploring and better defining the impact of health policies in the urban regeneration strategy of the city, taking into consideration that, at the moment Torino  is implementing nearly twenty different integrated actions of area based transformations.

Partners

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Lead Expert

Marco Santangelo marco.santangelo@gmail.com

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Marco Santangelo is a researcher in Geography at the Politecnico di Torino, where he teaches Geography and Development Geography in the First Faculty of Architecture and has been member of the EU-POLIS research centre since its foundation (www.polito.it/eupolis). He has worked on the ESPON 2000-2006 and URBACT I European research programmes and he is now involved in four main research activities: he is the Italian responsible for the European Commission promoted study on the influence of the Lisbon and Goteborg Strategy on the PORs; he is lead expert in a thematic network of the URBACT II Community Initiative regarding welfare and quality of life in cities; he is working on the relations between competitivity and territorial cohesion for a three years joint research activity of EU-POLIS and SiTI centres; he is taking part in the research programme co-ordinated by the IReR Lombardia on the development of strategic scenarios in the Varese and Bergamo areas.

Research interests

The different dimensions of local development processes and their relations with development processes at different territorial scales.

Urban policies in the EU with focuses on the concepts of local development, territorial cohesion, integrated approach and quality of life.