ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on work which was carried out in co-operation with the Healthy Cities Project Office in Europe to monitor the progress of cities in the early years of the project and which has been reported by Curtice and McQueen and by Tsouros. It then concerns especially with the conditions for one particular encounter: that between research and the developing project. The Healthy Cities project in Europe was established by WHO in 1986 as a demonstration project. The operational strategy was for a handful of European cities to transfer the lessons of public health work at city level to other cities, through national and international networks. The Healthy Cities project has developed a vision of what a healthy city could be like. The definition of health underlying the Healthy Cities project in Europe is social and ecological. Cities entered the Healthy Cities project with very different baselines of political preparation and institutional development.
