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What can sociology offer urban public health?

There is untapped empirical and theoretical potential within sociology, which could and should be harnessed for urban public health. The resurgence of interest in cities as both threats to human health and potential sites for addressing resistant public health challenges has opened up space for reimagining the levers for health improvement and health equity. This is not simply about the well-cited increasing urbanisation of the population. Focusing on urban health is also about rediscovering the place-based determinants of health and, importantly, recognising the city as a scale at which action might be achievable (Naylor & Buck, 2018). In the UK, devolution has provided opportunities for a fresh look at how effective, co-ordinated governance can make a difference, Worldwide, metropolitan mayors search for innovative ways to foster urban health. Echoing the call of Mykhalovskiy et al. (2019), in this issue, for more productive engagements of critical social science with public health, we here identify specific sociological contributions that can help with the task of reinvigorating urban public health. A rich tradition of sociological research on cities, dating back to the Chicago School, has drawn on detailed, grounded community studies to shed light on the complex ways in which environments and social organisation intersect in particular localities to produce or mitigate ill health. More recently, the city has been the focus of how we can rethink the links between the biological and the social (Fitzgerald et al., 2016). However, if health has been central to urban sociology, sociology has arguably become somewhat marginalised by public health over recent decades. Whereas health psychology – with its well developed, if under-utilised, evidence base on behaviour change – has been widely adopted, the insights of sociology have not been well integrated. As public health becomes increasingly the province of urban administrations, we point to the ways that sociological evidence, concepts and theory will be needed.