Abstract
By the end of 2020, more than 80 million people were forcibly displaced around the world; this represents about one percent of the global population. Many of the displaced found shelter in emergency settlements; whether in refugee camps, IDP camps or community settlements. Some of these settlements are transitory, while others have been consolidated into permanent habitats; some span the size of a city, while others are the size of a village; some are well structured, while others provide only the bare minimum needed by residents. Notwithstanding these variations, there is still a lack of understanding of the range, depth, scale, and scope of these settlements. There is also a need for comparative analysis between different types of emergency settlements, as they are still generalized as temporary encampments. The aim of the study is to identify the distinctiveness of each type of emergency settlement to demonstrate that one strategy for their planning and management will not fit all. It does so by reviewing the criteria for analyzing emergency settlements around the world by using a quantitative analysis methodology on a set of variables considered relevant for the characterization of each typology based on a set of 500 cases. The results indicate that each type of emergency settlement has different characteristics and topology, and identify which variables, being identical, influence each typology differently. The article also discusses the basis for better-informed decision-making about the medium and long-term policies applicable to individual settlements.
Highlights
Accepted: 6 December 2021The movement of people is not a new problem or a recent occurrence
The main objectives of this study are two-fold: to better characterize emergency settlements by sharing highly significant and comparative universal information, such as settlements’ average lifespan, demography and location; and to discuss and understand how the average lifespan of settlements, population, and location can be used as information to improve policy formulation on key questions such as whether emergency settlements should continue to be exclusively determined, planned and managed as temporary encampments or on the contrary, evaluated to determine whether some should be permanent in response to problems broader than migration
The settlements were divided into three main groups: refugee camps, which are settlements that accommodate refugees; internally displaced persons (IDP) settlements, which are settlements that accommodate forcibly displaced people in their country of origin; and community settlements, which are settlements adjacent to existing communities, which share most of their facilities and host refugees or IDPs
Summary
The movement of people is not a new problem or a recent occurrence. Even in forced situations, people found ways to create viable shelters. This concept faces new challenges of scale and exclusion of the refugees who are, according to the 1951 UN Convention, people “unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership or a particular social group, or political opinion”. More than 80 million people are forced to leave their homes for different reasons, increasingly including the impacts of climate change. The increase in climate refugees as a phenomenon of international migration occurs in reaction to more recent extreme environmental factors and due to war and famine [2]
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