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Although public health and urban planning emerged with the common goal of preventing urban outbreaks of infectious disease, there is little overlap between the fields today. The separation of the fields has contributed to uncoordinated efforts to address the health of urban populations and a general failure to recognize the links between, for example, the built environment and health disparities facing low-income populations and people of color. I review the historic connections and lack thereof between urban planning and public health, highlight some challenges facing efforts to recouple the fields, and suggest that insights from ecosocial theory and environmental justice offer a preliminary framework for reconnecting the fields around a social justice agenda.

This special feature calls for forward thinking around paths of convergence for agriculture, health, and wealth. Such convergence aims for a richer integration of smallholder farmers into national and global agricultural and food systems, health systems, value chains, and markets. The articles identify analytical innovation, where disciplines intersect, and cross-sectoral action where single, linear, and siloed approaches have traditionally dominated. The issues addressed are framed by three main themes: (i) lessons related to agricultural and food market growth since the 1960s; (ii) experiences related to the integration of smallholder agriculture into national and global business agendas; and (iii) insights into convergence-building institutional design and policy, including a review of complexity science methods that can inform such processes. In this introductory article, we first discuss the perspectives generated for more impactful policy and action when these three themes converge. We then push thematic boundaries to elaborate a roadmap for a broader, solution-oriented, and transdisciplinary approach to science, policies, and actions. As the global urban population crosses the 50% mark, both smallholder and nonsmallholder agriculture are keys in forging rural–urban links, where both farm and nonfarm activities contribute to sustainable nutrition security. The roadmaps would harness the power of business to reduce hunger and poverty for millions of families, contribute to a better alignment between human biology and modern lifestyles, and stem the spread of noncommunicable chronic diseases.

To mark the centenary of the 1917 Russian October Revolution (Nov 7-8 by the Gregorian calendar, which Russia adopted on Feb 14, 1918), we publish eight essays1-8 that examine the current state of health and the health system in light of Russia's key historical events (panel). The essays largely paint a grim picture of current approaches and health outcomes with a glimmer of hope that some enlightened politicians and health professionals in the country and some in the Russian population itself could be ready for change.

This paper analyzes the history of the modern consumer/survivor movement and its impact on the policy-making climate in the mental health field. The growing attentiveness to consumers' perspectives is presented largely as a consequence, not a cause, of radical restructurings of the mental health system. Consumers' perspectives have entered policy discourse in the wake of policy failures and have flourished in a climate of perpetual crisis and tight budgets. Precisely because it has been such a contested arena for so long, the mental health field has produced some innovative responses to demands for patient empowerment. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

In this excerpt from his autobiographical memoir Everybody In, Nobody Out, Quentin Young, MD, describes his work in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the \"Spurgeon 'Jake' Winters Free People's Medical Care Center\" organized by the Black Panther Party (BPP) in Chicago, Illinois. It was no surprise that when looking for allies to help with their free medical clinic for impoverished and underserved Black people in Chicago (\"so poor that they never go to the doctor until they are practically dying\") the Panthers turned to Quentin Young.

Although community development and social change are not explicit goals of community-oriented primary care (COPC), they are implicit in COPC’s emphasis on community organization and local participation with health professionals in the assessment of health problems. These goals are also implicit in the shared understanding of health problems’ social, physical, and economic causes and in the design of COPC interventions. In the mid-1960s, a community health center in the Mississippi Delta created programs designed to move beyond narrowly focused disease-specific interventions and address some of the root causes of community morbidity and mortality. Drawing on the skills of the community itself, a selfsustaining process of health-related social change was initiated. A key program involved the provision of educational opportunities.

Community-oriented primary care (COPC) developed and was tested over nearly 3 decades in the Hadassah Community Health Center in Jerusalem, Israel. Integration of public health responsibility with individual-based clinical management of patients formed the cornerstone of the COPC approach. A family medicine practice and a mother and child preventive service provided the frameworks for this development. The health needs of the community were assessed, priorities determined, and intervention programs developed and implemented on the basis of detailed analysis of the factors responsible for defined health states. Ongoing health surveillance facilitated evaluation, and the effectiveness of interventions in different population groups was illustrated. The center’s international COPC involvement has had effects on primary health care policy worldwide.

Mental health policy is shaped fundamentally by the definition of mental illness associated with the policy. Changing policies reflect changing definitions. At various times, the definition may be narrow or broad with respect to the scope of conditions covered by a specific policy. The priority accorded to impairment severity is the most crucial and enduring policy issue related to the definition of mental illness and the scope of that definition. This paper explores the role of definitions in framing mental health policy, using examples from the history of policy making over the past half-century. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Community-oriented primary care (COPC) originated in South Africa during the 1940s and 1950s, where it served to inform local church-based and nongovernmental organization–based initiatives during the apartheid years. During the 1990s, COPC played an inspirational role in the process of national health policy formulation. Yet COPC’s contribution to current health practice remains more symbolic than substantive. Despite a policy framework that favors the widespread introduction of COPC, various political, structural, managerial, and human resource obstacles constrain its effective implementation. Notwithstanding a rapidly changing health care environment and well-established health transition from infections and nutritional disorders to non-communicable diseases and injury, COPC and its variants remain abidingly relevant to South Africa’s—and Africa’s—health care reality. (Am J Public Health. 2002;92:1725–1728)

Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships, the most recent planning tool in public health practice, is built upon a long history of planning by local public health agencies (LPHAs). Planning by LPHAs has evolved over half a century from the earliest problem/program-focused planning, through more comprehensive approaches like the Planned Approach to Community Health (PATCH) and the Assessment Protocol for Excellence in Public Health (APEXPH) to strategic planning of today. While LPHAs were not notably participants in the federally sponsored health planning of the 1960s and 1970s, this planning left a legacy in public health. Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships introduces strategic thinking and a systems orientation into public health planning that builds upon this legacy.