Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Public health officials and academics around the world are promoting the use of municipal healthy public policies to improve population health. Building and implementing such policies is a challenging endeavour involving the horizontal management of intersectoral units; the layering of several orders of government whose jurisdictions meet on the urban space; asserting the legitimacy of integrating health into policies concerned with other areas of action. To better support population health interventions at the municipal level, we need research that deepens our understanding of urban governance processes that involve a variety of policy sectors (e.g., urban planning, transportation and public health) and actors (e.g., NGOs, activist, public, private and politicians). In this paper, we contend that urban policies for health develop at the conjunction of several policy subsystems in that they cut across several areas of municipal responsibilities. A key to developing urban policies for health would therefore be to strengthen the links between all the subsystems concerned. Our argument is based on the study of policies that promote walking and cycling as means of transportation within the cities of Montreal and Toronto. Active transportation policy develops at the junction of transportation, public transit, urban development, sports and leisure, and public health. The ability to involve actors from all these policy subsystems is key to the success of urban policies for health.