Healthy City Concepts

What does a healthy city mean in wartime?
A healthy city is a place where the physical and social environment supports people’s health, safety, wellbeing and ability to participate in everyday life. It is more than a city with functioning infrastructure.
The World Health Organization describes a healthy city not as a fixed outcome, but as an ongoing process of creating and improving the conditions that allow people and communities to live healthier lives.
For Ukraine, this concept needs to respond to the realities of war and recovery.
Alongside questions of mobility, ecology, energy, air pollution, economic development and social cohesion, Ukrainian cities are facing challenges related to safety, displacement, accessibility, environmental damage and the changing needs of their communities.
Ro3kvit adapts the principles of the Healthy City approach to the realities of Ukrainian cities during war and recovery. Drawing on its work with municipalities and communities across Ukraine, Ro3kvit explores how spatial planning can contribute to healthier, safer, more inclusive and environmentally resilient cities. who took part in interviews, workshops, and discussions.
We see recovery as a process of change—at the level of neighborhoods, everyday routes, and decisions that truly matter to people.

Planning health through the city
Urban planning decisions directly influence how people live, move, meet, work and recover. Questions of health therefore cannot be separated from decisions about public space, housing, mobility, greenery, water, energy, accessibility and social infrastructure.
In the Ukrainian context, Ro3kvit focuses particularly on several interconnected dimensions of urban health: the environmental impact of land use and industry; social inclusion and accessibility; safety in the context of war; and the role of blue-green infrastructure in creating healthier and more climate-resilient cities.
Fulco Treffers: “As a result of the war, more and more people in Ukraine are living with injuries and disabilities, including veterans and civilians. This makes accessible public spaces, streets and buildings increasingly important.
Less visible, but equally important, is the impact of the war on mental health. Depression, PTSD and prolonged stress affect a growing number of people. We need to think about what this means for the way we design our cities: how parks, streets, neighbourhoods and public spaces can support mental wellbeing, social connection and recovery.”

From principles to practice
The principles of a Healthy City already intersect with several areas of Ro3kvit’s work in Ukrainian cities.
In Kamianske, the Urban Resilience Strategy addresses the relationship between industrial activity, environmental conditions and residents’ health. It proposes measures related to environmental monitoring, urban greening, cooperation between the municipality and industrial stakeholders, and the reuse of industrial waste through circular approaches.
In Zaporizhzhia, Ro3kvit worked on redesigning several intersections along the city’s central avenue according to accessibility principles. The project developed solutions that can also inform the transformation of other intersections across the city, contributing to a more accessible urban environment for people with different needs.
In Kremenchuk, climate resilience planning focused on strengthening the city’s blue-green network and rethinking the Dnipro embankment as both an urban ecosystem and a recreational space that contributes to residents’ quality of life. The strategy proposed measures to preserve and expand green-blue corridors and strengthen the city’s resilience to climate change.
Together, these projects show how health can become a practical consideration in decisions about urban space, infrastructure, accessibility and the environment, rather than a separate topic addressed only through healthcare.

Developing the Healthy City approach in Ukraine
Over the past years, Ro3kvit’s work across Ukrainian cities has generated growing knowledge about what Healthy City principles mean in the context of war and recovery. We are now building on this experience in two ways.
First, Ro3kvit is developing a Healthy City methodology for Ukraine that can support strategic planning at different levels within municipalities, from neighbourhoods to the city as a whole. Second, these principles are already being applied in practice through Ro3kvit’s urban design and capacity-building projects across Ukraine.
Ro3kvit also aims to connect Ukrainian experience with the wider international network of Healthy City practitioners and contribute knowledge about planning for health in conditions of war, displacement and long-term recovery.