Urban Water Safety and Human Health and Wellbeing

Access to safe and affordable water remains a challenge for many residents of urban informal settlements, a population that is growing rapidly and reached an estimated 1.12 billion people worldwide in 2023. Even where municipal water is relatively safe at the source, contamination can occur as water moves from shared collection points through the “human infrastructure” that carries it to people’s homes, often linked to gaps in environmental sanitation. A growing body of evidence links unsafe water to a range of adverse outcomes for residents and wider society, with potential implications for public health, including disease transmission. International targets such as UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 6.2 aim to address these conditions. New approaches and tools continue to emerge, yet ensuring safe water at the point of use remains difficult. Evidence suggests that place-specific, time-limited, hardware-focused interventions have often had limited long-term success, prompting interest in complementary action at the urban scale through improvements to the wider environment and a stronger role for urban planning and development.

Scholars have identified several knowledge gaps in this area. This Research Topic aims to explore these gaps, which include but are not limited to:
• Data gaps: Evidence on how socio-environmental factors jointly influence drinking water safety is limited for a large share of the global population, with little disaggregation at sub-national or city scales.
• Informal settlements as distinctive socio-spatial contexts: Where these contexts are not accounted for, neighbourhood-level effects on drinking water safety may be overlooked, obscuring the extent of related health and wellbeing challenges.
• Emerging frameworks (e.g. One Health, Social Determinants of Health): These frameworks highlight the value of co-producing solutions with diverse stakeholders and attending to human–environment interactions. In practice, governance and political-economy factors can shape how much attention informal settlements receive in policies and programmes. Informal land tenure can limit the legal basis for direct state intervention, and service provision is sometimes taken up by non-profit, civic, or commercial intermediaries whose involvement varies in scope, continuity, and outcomes. These dynamics raise questions around collective action, co-production, the balance between affordability and acceptability, and tenure.

Methodologies that engage the “interaction turn” in knowledge co-production may help address these gaps by involving affected communities and social actors as subjects, producers, and users of knowledge. Contributions drawing on other theoretical and methodological perspectives, including those that test, qualify, or challenge these ideas, are equally welcome.

We welcome contributions from all regions and settings. Submissions may:
• analyse or assess how their work, and that of others, engages with the goals above;
• present approaches that succeeded as well as those that did not, since both offer valuable lessons; and
• examine the barriers to, and importance of, sustained community engagement, including what happens when initial funding ends and communities take on a larger role.

We welcome original research, reviews, and other article types accepted by the section, and encourage a range of disciplinary and methodological approaches.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Health, Safe Water, Urban Informality, Urban Poverty, WASH

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.