Abstract
The concept of ‘healthy city’ has had a long establishment in public health
management literature. It was initially used to describe the living conditions of cities in
developed economies (Duhl, 1986). In late 1980s, The World Health Organization (WHO)'s
European Office initiated a major new project known as ‘Healthy Cities’ – the time the term
started to draw both researcher and policy-maker attentions and became widely-used. It was
used to support public health promotion at the city level. The city being often the lowest
administrative level is thus believed to have the power to marshal the resources as well as the
political mandate and authority to develop and implement integrative approaches to health
(Ashton, J., Grey, P. & Barnard, K., 1986). It was only since the 1990s that scholars and
public bodies started to consider it in the context of developing countries. For example,
between 1995 and 1999 the WHO Geneva undertook healthy city projects in Cox's Bazar,
Bangladesh, Dares Salaam, Tanzania, Fayoum, Egypt, Managua, Nicaragua, and Quetta,
Pakistan. These projects marked the shifting political mentality of increasing attention to
peripheral regions of the world in terms of improving their living conditions (Harpham, T.,
Burton, S. & Blue, I., 2001; Ramaswami, A., Russell, A. G., Culligan, P. J., Sharma, K. R., &
Kumar, E., 2016).