Evaluation of the Healthy Cities Movement in the Republic of Korea

The concept of Healthy Cities has gained significant momentum in the Republic of Korea in the recent years. Starting with only 4 local municipalities in 2004, the membership has rapidly grown to 48 in 2008, which accounts for 20% of all Korean local authorities.

This phenomenon attracts great interest in several aspects – initiation from within local governments apart from the pre-existing national health promotion programs and subsequent cooperation, partnerships with local universities, capacity building and networking efforts and increasing political support.

This study analyzes responses of in-depth interviews from the four initial Healthy Cities and responses from standardized surveys of all 48 current Healthy Cities. We assessed progress in the major domains of healthy cities projects.

Strong collaboration with academic institutions, establishment of full-time healthy city project teams and support from the central government are shown to be major strengths and opportunities while low community participation, weak partnership with the private sectors and moderate inter-sectoral partnerships within the city government are the future challenges for Korean Healthy Cities. Also, the participating cities sought support from international networking activities, and regarded membership to the Alliance for Healthy Cities as the starting point of a Healthy Cities Program.

With the upcoming Global Conference of the Alliance for Healthy Cities to be hosted in Seoul in October 2010, research in this field is encouraged within the Korean public health society.