2025 CONFERENCE
Theme: Resilient Healthy Cities: Creating Sustainable Urban Futures for All
Date: 17–19 June 2025
Location: Bursa, Türkiye
Cities are the epicentre of innovation and opportunity and face an evolving landscape of challenges, from climate change to public health crises, making resilience and preparedness more crucial than ever. For the network, urban resilience is focused on preparing cities to adapt, grow, and thrive despite chronic stresses and acute shocks. It involves the capacity to withstand disruptions while maintaining essential functions and adapting to emerging challenges.
The WHO European Healthy Cities Network was launched in 1988 as a political, cross-cutting and intersectoral initiative to be implemented through direct collaboration with cities. It is comprised of 88 flagship WHO healthy cities and over 20 national healthy cities networks, together having more than 1900 cities and municipalities as members in total. A key strategic mechanism of the European Healthy Cities Network is the Annual Healthy Cities Business Meeting and Technical Conference. These meetings bring together both political representatives and technical focal points from the WHO flagship cities and the national networks.
The 2025 conference will take place in Bursa, Türkiye from 17–19 June 2025. It will mark a significant transition as the network moves from Phase VII to Phase VIII, reflecting on the progress made and charting a course for future priorities. The theme and subthemes of this year’s conference will build on the Copenhagen Consensus of Mayors from 2018, One Health, and more recently, the European Regional High-level Forum on Health in the Well-Being Economy. This year’s theme is Resilient Healthy Cities: Creating Sustainable Urban Futures for All, and will feature abstracts of the following sub-themes:
- Prosperity: Thriving Cities, Thriving Futures—The Well-Being Economy in Action
- Planet: Climate-Ready Cities—One Health for a Sustainable Tomorrow
- Participation: Cities by Us, For Us—Co-Creating the Urban Future
- People: Leaving No One Behind: Promoting Equity in Urban Health
- Place: Designing Healthy and Equitable Spaces
- Peace: Fostering Safe and Inclusive Cities for All
The meeting will be delivered as an in-person conference and will be coordinated by the Healthy Cities Secretariat in the Division for Communicable Diseases, Environment and Health. This will be the fifth and the final Annual Business Meeting to be held in Phase VII (2019-2025) of the WHO European Healthy Cities Network. The conference will provide a pivotal moment to celebrate achievements, reflect on challenges, and transition into Phase VIII with renewed commitment.
