A community-engaged infection prevention and control approach to Ebola.

The real missing link in Ebola control efforts to date may lie in the failure to apply core principles of health promotion: the early, active and sustained engagement of affected communities, their trusted leaders, networks and lay knowledge, to help inform what local control teams do, and how they may better do it, in partnership with communities. The predominant focus on viral transmission has inadvertently stigmatized and created fear-driven responses among affected individuals, families and communities. While rigorous adherence to standard infection prevention and control (IPC) precautions and safety standards for Ebola is critical, we may be more successful if we validate and combine local community knowledge and experiences with that of IPC medical teams. In an environment of trust, community partners can help us learn of modest adjustments that would not compromise safety but could improve community understanding of, and responses to, disease control protocol, so that it better reflects their 'community protocol' (local customs, beliefs, knowledge and practices) and concerns. Drawing on the experience of local experts in several African nations and of community-engaged health promotion leaders in the USA, Canada and WHO, we present an eight step model, from entering communities with cultural humility, though reciprocal learning and trust, multi-method communication, development of the joint protocol, to assessing progress and outcomes and building for sustainability. Using examples of changes that are culturally relevant yet maintain safety, we illustrate how often minor adjustments can help prevent and treat the most serious emerging infectious disease since HIV/AIDS

Creating ‘urban commons’: Towards a sustainable informal settlements upgrading paradigm in South Africa

More than 1.2 million households in South Africa live in informal settlements, without access to adequate shelter, services or secure tenure. There has been a gradual shift to upgrading these informal settlements in recent years, and there have been some innovative experiments. Upgrading Informal Settlements in South Africa: a partnership-based approach examines the successes and challenges of informal settlement upgrading initiatives in South Africa and contextualises these experiences within global debates about informal settlement upgrading and urban transformation. The book discusses: The South African informal settlement upgrading agenda from local, national and international perspectives South African ‘city experiences’ with informal housing and upgrading The role of partnerships, actors and capabilities in pursuing an incremental upgrading agenda Tools, instruments and methodologies for incremental upgrading Implications of the upgrading agenda for the transformation of cities The book has been written and edited by a wide range of practitioners and researchers from government, NGOs, the private sector and academia. It covers theory and practice and represents a vast accumulated body of housing experience in South Africa

Learning from Practice: Environmental and Community Mapping as Participatory Action Research in Planning

While the practice stories of Italian planners will appear in a forthcoming book (De Leo & Forester, 2017), authors have selected Pappalardo’s account to examine here with the help of five distinguished commentators from Italy, Brazil, Kenya, and the USA. The detailed practice account that follows reveals specific aspects of innovating in daunting planning contexts. In particular, we learn about new practices that integrate common and traditional plan-making techniques of planners with skills of enabling productive, even transformative engagements with local people and the territories in which they live. We learn here too about new possibilities of teaching by identifying essential skills that are often neither taught nor tested in university curricula