Adapting to Urban Displacement - Forced Migration Review, Feb. 2010.
Full-text: http://www.fmreview.org/urban-displacement/FMR34.pdf (pdf, 2.89MB)
For the first time in history there are now more people living in towns and cities than outside them is not in itself a reason for FMR to be covering urban displacement. Behind that fact, however, lies the multiplicity of reasons why people have been moving into urban environments and the reality that for many of them it is not a matter of choice.
Relatively little is known about the precise numbers of those forcibly displaced into urban settings, their demographics, basic needs or protection problems. They may choose to be displaced in cities rather than in camps but they did not choose to be displaced, and therefore they may have rights to protection and assistance under humanitarian law. For internally displaced people the situation is especially confused, as they are likely to be living among compatriots facing similar difficulties and challenges – whether city-born residents or, for example, rural-urban economic migrants.
In their introductory articles in this issue of FMR, UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres and UN-HABITAT Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka emphasise the complexity of the challenges faced by those displaced into urban areas and by those seeking to protect and assist them, and argue for the need for a radical rethinking of approaches. The articles that follow address some of the practical and policy issues that urban displaced people face and that affect providers too.
Contents – Adapting to urban displacement
5 Meeting humanitarian challenges in urban areas
8 Protection challenges for persons of concern in urban settings
10 Urban displacement and migration in Colombia
11 Invisibility of urban IDPs in Europe
13 Profiling urban IDPs
16 Improving living conditions in Bossaso, Somalia
18 The poor and the displaced in Khartoum
19 The journey towards social exclusion in Colombia
20 Desperate lives: urban refugee women in Malaysia and Egypt
22 Urban refugee health: meeting the challenges
24 Support systems among urban IDPs in Georgia
25 Education and self-reliance in Egypt
27 Urban shelter and the limits of humanitarian action
29 Refugees and space in urban areas in Malaysia
32 Urban IDPs in Uganda: victims of institutional convenience
34 Transition, connection and uncertainty:
36 Urban Somali refugees in Yemen
38 Displacement within the city: Colombia
39 The role of municipal authorities
40 Surviving in the city
