ABSTRACT
Conventional scientific research and the Healthy Cities concept belong to two fundamentally different worlds: the modern and the post-modern. Modernity is the world of conventional scientific research and rational administration applied to problems, physical or social. Post-modernity is a world of aesthetics, of the deconstruction of conventional social arrangements, and of experimentation in cultural, artistic and life forms. The Healthy Cities movement is one such experiment. The core idea of post-modernity is that the social and moral conditions pertaining in the world at the present time mark a fundamental break with the past. Post-modernity as a sociological, philosophical, cultural and artistic idea has many meanings. The Healthy Cities project and the Health for All movement must acknowledge that systems of perfection are modern Utopian inventions, and that human happiness is not so much a product of human institutions, but more a product of human relationships.
