TYPE Editorial PUBLISHED 13 March 2024 DOI 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1367882 OPEN ACCESS EDITED AND REVIEWED BY Maximilian Pangratius de Courten, Victoria University, Australia *CORRESPONDENCE Ritu Priya ritu_priya_jnu@yahoo.com RECEIVED 09 January 2024 ACCEPTED 04 March 2024 PUBLISHED 13 March 2024 CITATION Priya R, Das S, Payyappallimana U, Porter J, George M, Stephens C and Siri J (2024) Editorial: Urban health and planning in the 21st Century: bridging across the formal and informal using an eco-social lens. Front. Public Health 12:1367882. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1367882 COPYRIGHT © 2024 Priya, Das, Payyappallimana, Porter, George, Stephens and Siri. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Editorial: Urban health and planning in the 21st Century: bridging across the formal and informal using an eco-social lens Ritu Priya 1 *, Sayan Das 1 , Unnikrishnan Payyappallimana 2 , John Porter 3 , Mathew George 4 , Carolyn Stephens 5 and Jose Siri 6 1 Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, 2 Center for Community Health, Clinical Research and Education, Trans Discipilinary University, Bangalore, India, 3 Faculty of Public Health and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London, London, United Kingdom, 4 Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, Central University of Kerala, Kasaragod, Kerala, India, 5 London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London, London, United Kingdom, 6 World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland KEYWORDS eco-social perspective, urban informality, urban health care, urban wellbeing, pathways to bridging formal-informal, sustainable urbanization, urban governance, rural-urban continuum Editorial on the Research Topic Urban health and planning in the 21st Century: bridging across the formal and informal using an eco-social lens In today’s rapidly urbanizing world, the issues surrounding the nature of urbanization, urban habitats and urban policies have become critical to ensure the collective health and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. Environmental degradation and climate change, emerging infectious diseases, rising non-communicable diseases at younger ages, increasing urban population density, and intensifying inequalities in access to healthcare, among others, pose serious challenges today, demanding a creative rethink of urban health and its determinants. Urban health and wellbeing emerge from the dynamic relationship shared between urban dwellers and their living environments, shaped by their differential capabilities to meet habitat, healthcare and other needs in light of planned urban development. Urban living, involving health-related practices, livelihoods or quotidian amenities and routines, typically bridges the formal and informal divide present in policy. The complementarities and contradictions shaping the complexity of urban health need multimodal explorations into not just the urban health system but also urban design, planning and management for sustainable urbanization. The break in the relationship between public health and urban planning as twin approaches to address the same set of problems needs to be remedied. In urban planning, there is increasing recognition of the value of understanding the “informal” as a ubiquitous presence that merits incorporation into formal planned interventions (1). In public health, however, this is not yet as pervasive an idea, despite the well studied presence of “the folk” in health-related practices, and even less so when thinking about urban health (2). The studies included under this Research Topic bring attention to the phenomenon of the “informal” spanning a wide range of issues from examining determinants of Frontiers in Public Health 01 frontiersin.org