Understanding the role of universities in the European Healthy Cities Programme

The WHO Collaborating Centre is a founder member of HAVEN, a European consortium of universities and healthy cities set up to provide academic support to the European Healthy City Network (EHCN). In order to identify which ‘healthy city’ goals and activities have the most potential for support and collaboration, a survey was carried out across the whole network of 84 cities. It asked who their key partners were and what sort of knowledge and academic input they needed to enable them to best achieve the aims of the WHO Healthy Cities programme. The survey also explored existing connections with academia in order to identify what types of collaboration currently flourished.