A Manifesto for the Just City 2021 54 // 404
MIGRATION AND DIVERSITY IN THE CITY PROFESSOR ROMOLA SANYAL
T
oday I have the privilege of speaking broadly about questions around migration and diversity. There are many different ways of approaching these issues. There are scholars who discuss questions around migrants and conviviality, super-diversity, around urban citizenship, right to the city and so on. My take on the subject is somewhat different, and uses displacement as a lens to study urbanisation. My work for nearly two decades now has focused on displaced populations in urban areas, particularly in the Global South (in the Middle East-Lebanon and South AsiaIndia). Roberto thought this would be a good fit for this particular theme (I hope he is right) and so my talk is titled “Invisible City Makers- Making Cities Just for Forced Migrants.” In this talk then, I hope to do three things- highlight the ways in which displaced populations re-craft cities but remain invisible or hidden, bring them into conversation with irregular migrants and end with thinking of what that means for questions of justice for them. Let me start with a somewhat clichéd line which is to highlight the numbers of people who are displaced globally. Currently, there are over 80 million people who are considered as persons of concern by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) which is the UN body tasked with protecting refugees, forcibly displaced communities and stateless people. A number of different populations fall under their mandate- refugees, internally displaced people, asylum seekers,
stateless populations and so forth. There is a longer history of protecting displaced people, which I shall not get into at this point, but I will just note here that the current humanitarian and human rights system that we have in place only came about in the post WWII period, though its roots run farther back and foundational values run deeper into antiquity. In this post war framework of protection, there has been an increasing push towards putting displaced people in designated areas, specifically camps. This is particularly true of refugees (who are people who have crossed international borders in search of protection). Displacement has also increasingly shifted from Europe (from where much of the framework is derived) to the Global South and the camp itself has become a geography associated with the Global South (although as scholars note, it is making its way back to Europe again today). However, despite the push for encampment as a solution to the problem of displacement, and particularly protracted displacement, many displaced people (and perhaps most of them?) have not lived in camps, but in cities. They just have not been recognised or counted. There are political reasons for this and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has long bowed to pressure from host governments and pushed for an encampment agenda. It was only in 2009 that UNHCR changed its policy to recognise urban refugees and extend protection to them. They acknowledged that more than half the world’s displaced live in cities and that number has only grown.
Professor Romola Sanyal. Photo provided by Romola Sanyal. Printed with permission.
LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
