Displacement Asylum And The City

This edited volume draws attention to the interlinked yet understudied relationship between the role of cities in dealing with international displacement and forced migration and the influence of forced migration in stimulating spatial, societal, and institutional transformations in and of cities. In 2022, almost 84 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced. More than two-thirds of them reside in urban areas. Displacement and forced migration are an urban experience and an urban story of those seeking protection. This book helps us understanding the conditions of displaced population in cities, and the way cities and urban actors respond to recent migration trends. It applies an urban perspective to the analysis of migration processes, and it provides insights into the urban governance of forced migration and asylum, the production of spaces related to forced migration, and the role of the displaced population as actors of urban change. Thereby, it covers a broad spectrum of topics including migrant dispersal, welfare and social protection, urban humanitarian policymaking and governance, neighbourhood development, migrant solidarity and refugee protest, and new refugee and migrant destinations. Given the increasing mobility and displacement of human populations, this book provides a relevant prerequisite for readers interested in current urban, (forced) migration and asylum trends, and on the intersections of those topics. The book will be of great value to researchers and academics of Geography, Migration and Urban Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Urban Geography.

There is growing political concern about the increasing numbers of people displaced both within the borders of their countries and internationally. This volume explores the interrelated drivers of contemporary global displacement with a particular focus on low-level conflict, climatic and environmental change and infrastructure development. The authors examine the governance of global displacement assessing the protection needs and responses of national governments and the international community. It further considers options for improving the humanitarian and political management of this growing problem.

Making Home(s) in Displacement critically rethinks the relationship between home and displacement from a spatial, material, and architectural perspective. Recent scholarship in the social sciences has investigated how migrants and refugees create and reproduce home under new conditions, thereby unpacking the seemingly contradictory positions of making a home and overcoming its loss. Yet, making home(s) in displacement is also a spatial practice, one which intrinsically relates to the fabrication of the built environment worldwide. Conceptually the book is divided along four spatial sites, referred to as camp, shelter, city, and house, which are approached with a multitude of perspectives ranging from urban planning and architecture to anthropology, geography, philosophy, gender studies, and urban history, all with a common focus on space and spatiality. By articulating everyday homemaking experiences of migrants and refugees as spatial practices in a variety of geopolitical and historical contexts, this edited volume adds a novel perspective to the existing interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of home and displacement. It equally intends to broaden the canon of architectural histories and theories by including migrants' and refugees' spatial agencies and place-making practices to its annals. By highlighting the political in the spatial, and vice versa, this volume sets out to decentralise and decolonise current definitions of home and displacement, striving for a more pluralistic outlook on the idea of home.

Refugees are forced to gamble with their lives to flee conflicts, and if they arrive at their intended destination unscathed, they may face the turbulent prospect of asylum defined by a meagre existence, social exclusion, poverty, and even homelessness. Operating at different scales and imagined places, homelessness and asylum seeking are issues of fundamental social justice typically viewed as a problem of cities and crises of national and international concern respectively. However, over the past two decades in particular, the increasing and volatile numbers of asylum seekers arriving in the West have created a new form of homelessness, mainly hidden, often vulnerable, and located in the interstices of international and local displacement. Considering refugee settlement in London, England, and Toronto, Canada, this book argues that this new form of homelessness also requires a new perspective in order to be properly understood, and this perspective should come from refugees themselves. Two main questions are considered: “How do refugees conceive, locate, and reconstruct ‘home’ in the asylum and settlement process?” and “How do national and residential dynamics affect refugees’ sense of home or homelessness?” Drawing on structuration theory amongst other ideas, the book examines the relationship between “refugeeness” and homelessness, and how each is shaped in the countries of asylum. Managed migration strategies in Canada and deterrent migration strategies in the UK have a profound effect on refugees’ perceptions of belonging and acceptance, equality, and the desire and ability to make a home for themselves. In addition to shaping notions of belonging, national support and services (or the lack thereof) structure the pathways to homelessness, revealing distinct trajectories amongst refugees in London and Toronto. The author’s proceeds from the sale of this book will be contributed to the Canadian Council for Refugees.

UNHCR, the world's largest humanitarian organization charged with assisting displaced people globally, estimates over 60 per cent of refugees now live in urban areas. This book explores how UNHCR's approach to urban displacement has changed since the 1990s through an in-depth study of how UNHCR works and conceives its role in global politics today.

This book is a philosophical analysis of the ethical treatment of refugees and stateless people, a group of people who, though extremely important politically, have been greatly under theorized philosophically. The limited philosophical discussion of refugees by philosophers focuses narrowly on the question of whether or not we, as members of Western states, have moral obligations to admit refugees into our countries. This book reframes this debate and shows why it is important to think ethically about people who will never be resettled and who live for prolonged periods outside of all political communities. Parekh shows why philosophers ought to be concerned with ethical norms that will help stateless people mitigate the harms of statelessness even while they remain formally excluded from states. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315883854, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book aims to develop global conversations around refuge. Through an interdisciplinary, transnational and historical set of chapters, the authors develop new theoretical frameworks for scholars working on the forced displacement of people around the world, including refugees, stateless persons, internally displaced persons and others.

This book argues that states have a special obligation to offer asylum as a form of reparation to refugees for whose flight they are responsible. It shows the great relevance of reparative justice, and the importance of the causes of contemporary forced migration, for our understanding of states’ responsibilities to refugees. Part I explains how this view presents an alternative to the dominant humanitarian approach to asylum in political theory and some practice. Part II outlines the conditions under which asylum should act as a form of reparation, arguing that a state owes this form of asylum to refugees where it bears responsibility for the unjustified harms that they experience, and where asylum is the most fitting form of reparation available. Part III explores some of the ethical implications of this reparative approach to asylum for the workings of states’ asylum systems and the international politics of refugee protection.