The recent experiences and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic provide a valuable lens for understanding the vulnerabilities of informal settlements and how they are positioned to respond to other large-scale hazards. This article explores the body of knowledge on the pandemic in the context of informal settlements, guided by the scoping review strategy. Our findings reveal that COVID-19 has impacted informal settlements in several ways, including increasing loss of income, food insecurity, increased gender inequality, gender-based violence and forced evictions. While there have been numerous responses to the crisis, several pre-existing factors in informal settlements impeded their implementation. We note that lessons from the pandemic provide an important opportunity to address pre-existing vulnerabilities in informal settlements to make them more resilient to both health and environmental shocks.

In contemporary post-apartheid a number of housing policies have been made since the 1994 democratic dispensation in an attempt to solve housing problems especially for poor and low-income population in South Africa. The most recent policy has been the Comprehensive Housing Plan for the Development of Integrated Sustainable Human Settlements commonly known as the Breaking New Ground (BNG) housing plan of 2004. The aims of this paper are to present an overview and empirical analysis on research and emerging legitimisation of the participation of informal institutions in planning phase for housing development in rural areas. This paper analyses public participatory processes in the planning phase of rural housing project(s) in Jozini Municipality in KwaZulu-Natal. Since the establishment of a fully-fledged local government institutions and the promulgation of the BNG in 2004, inhabitants have experienced materialisation of new housing opportunities for community members. These opportunities created during the planning phase which results to community members benefiting in housing development excludes the poor in the process of self-help subsidy administration and housing allocation. Grounded on the works of Foucauldian scholars especially the ‘discourse of power’ in participation, the paper argues that the local community members not only embody the local knowledge to be accessed, but their participation presents an important entry point to the political decision-making needed for collecting differing viewpoints and interests but also for initiating the negotiations needed that would lead to coordination, if not cooperation for housing development. We propose that participatory processes that are beneficiary to the poor are best understood when traced over time as a dynamic response to a constantly unfolding-project related intervention.

The publisher (AOSIS) endorses the South African 'National Scholarly Book Publishers Forum Best Practice for Peer Review of Scholarly Books'. The manuscript underwent an evaluation to compare the level of originality with other published works and was subjected to rigorous two-step peer review before publication, with the identities of the reviewers not revealed to the editor(s) or author(s). The reviewers were independent of the publisher, editor(s) and author(s). The publisher shared feedback on the similarity report and the reviewers' inputs with the manuscript's editor(s) or author(s) to improve the manuscript. Where the reviewers recommended revision and improvements the editor(s) or author(s) responded adequately to such recommendations. The reviewers commented positively on the scholarly merits of the manuscript and recommended that the book be published.

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