Urban Displacement Research Articles

Urban displacement and placemaking in public space for wellbeing: a systematic review of global literature

Cities and towns are critical geographies of refuge for a globally unprecedented number of forcibly displaced people. Yet urban processes also expose these groups and the local urban poor to recurrent displacements. While such experiences are shared, studies often treat these populations as distinct. Drawing on Yiftachel’s notion of displaceability, this paper systematically reviews and synthesizes a global literature on diversely displaced people’s placemaking in urban public space. Observing a significant analytical gap regarding cities of the so-called global South, the paper identifies a heuristic, and key analytical dimensions shaping divergent access and uses of public space by variously displaced populations. These concern: temporal patterns; powerful meta-narratives of people and place; and complex multi-scalar and multi-actor configurations of regulatory regimes governing public space. Simultaneously, acquisition and deployment of urban knowledge and a practice of (in)visibility enable differentially displaced populations’ everyday claims to public space for wellbeing.

Self-reliance programming in urban displacement: a pragmatic approach or a disillusionment?

The promotion of self-reliance for refugees is a well-established policy priority within the global refugee support regime, hosting states and for many refugee-supporting organizations. For urban refugees, there is growing recognition of needs as well as potential for self-reliance support. However, meaningful investments in and commitment to the objective of self-reliance remain insufficient and critiques of the concept as an empty buzzword are many and substantial. This is a dialogue between Kellie Leeson and Boel McAteer, in which they elaborate on empirical examples of self-reliance programmes as either beneficial (Kellie) or counterproductive (Boel) to achieving genuine self-reliance. They conclude that self-reliance can only be wholly achieved alongside full refugee rights. They provide novel views of the concept by framing self-reliance as temporal and pragmatic on the one hand, and, on the other, by highlighting that the “self” in self-reliance often becomes unrealistically accentuated for urban refugees.

Embodiment of structural vulnerability: illness experiences among Somali refugee women in urban displacement

ABSTRACT Objectives Forced migration and its subsequent sequelae have caused refugees to face significant adversities throughout the displacement process, making them susceptible to significant health issues. Refugees displaced in Africa are a group especially vulnerable to poor health outcomes, experiencing a documented decline in overall physical and mental health status and rise in mortality from non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Despite the heightened health risks experienced by Somali refugees, particularly women, research into their complex illness experiences and co-/multimorbid health conditions is scarce, leaving a gap in our understanding of the multifaceted health challenges of this population. Design Using structural vulnerability theory, this study explores how the broader host context shapes illness experiences for Somali refugee women in Kenya. Specifically, we describe the factors associated with illness experiences of urban Somali refugee women and how this compares with women with other similarly situated identities, such as Somali Kenyan women, other/non-Somali refugees, and Kenyan women. In-depth interviews were conducted with 43 women in Eastleigh, Kenya. Results Using hybrid thematic analysis, the emergent themes were grouped into three distinct domains: (1) multimorbid, complex illness experiences, (2) embodiment of structural vulnerability, and (3) distinct/shared vulnerability among refugee/non-refugee women. Results suggest that illness experiences of displaced refugee women are inextricably linked to traumatic experiences before displacement, as well as the experiences of transmigration stressors and the hostile socio-legal dynamics encountered post-displacement. Conclusions Our findings also have implications for the need to consider intersectional identities when examining for differential exposure to structural risks and the susceptibility to poor health experiences as well as supports the need for urgent change and improvement in systems of social protection and basic care for refugees experiencing prolonged displacement.

The slow violence of waiting in the unmaking of public housing

ABSTRACT While the unmaking of public housing in the US and the subsequent displacement of residents is a widely studied phenomenon, this intervention aims to bring awareness to an absence of waiting in our reading of urban displacement. The literature on waiting, coming mostly from forced migration and refugee studies, has so far not been applied to the case of persons displaced from their homes in US cities. This contribution critically reflects current debates on temporalities in urban redevelopment and aims to thoroughly engage with waiting as an integral part of displacement to flesh out the slow violence and power-geometries of home-unmaking. To illustrate the importance of waiting for urban geography, this intervention briefly discusses the redevelopment of a public housing project in Washington, DC. Five years after the demolition of the project, it is still a brownfield, with its residents scattered across the city, even though they were promised that they could return. The residents thus struggle to inhabit the liminal spaces they are in, while they battle the uncertainty and arbitrariness of waiting to return to their homes.

Coping Mechanisms amongst Refugee Women and Girls in Post Conflict Situations: A Case of Lusaka Urban Center

Women and girls constitute over half of displaced populations globally, yet their perspectives and needs often go overlooked in policymaking and humanitarian response. This study explores the coping mechanisms utilized by refugee women and girls in post-conflict urban displacement contexts, focusing specifically on Lusaka, Zambia. Adopting a qualitative approach, the research examines the challenges faced, strategies for meeting daily needs, and process of accessing services for refugee women and girls relocated to Zambia's capital. Key findings reveal profound systemic discrimination and barriers obstructing refugees' ability to integrate and meet basic needs. With inadequate access to facilities and widespread harassment, women rely heavily on fragile social networks, exploitative informal work, and inconsistent aid to survive. Despite resilience displayed through faith, help-seeking, and resolute endurance, social isolation, and barriers navigating complex bureaucracies exacerbate risks. Ultimately the study exposes policy and programming failures fulfilling protection obligations, necessitating urgent actions to empower displaced females. Recommendations include improving access to services, fostering social inclusion, enabling livelihoods, strengthening legal protections, and embracing participatory approaches led by refugee women themselves. Fulfilling commitments to this vulnerable group requires comprehensive reforms addressing root causes of marginalization across sectors.

Disappearance, emergence, and appearance: garbage and the politics of placemaking in Cartagena, Colombia

ABSTRACT This paper examines the politics of placemaking in an expanding self-built settlement in the city of Cartagena, Colombia, under everyday conditions of disposability and waste toxicity. Based on 11 months of ethnographic research, the paper introduces the triptych of disappearance, emergence, and appearance to categorize residents’ everyday garbage-based practices. The paper argues that these three forms of garbage-based practices are racialized and forged through historical processes of urban displacement, shifting socio-political backgrounds, and legacies of violence. This paper highlights the intimate links between the material and social production of Black placemaking and embodied experiences of toxicities in Cartagena. It draws attention to the multiple ways in which Afro-Colombian residents endure and contest cumulative processes of embodied experiences of waste exposure through politics of placemaking. Garbage socio-material entanglements allow for the acknowledgement of the relationality of space, materials, people, and politics, which are constitutive of contentious relational politics of placemaking. As residents in urban contexts contend with ever-evolving waste challenges, this paper proposes novel ways of reading the inherent plurality of relational politics of placemaking, which can foreshadow alternative urban environmental futures.

Special Feature: Putting urban displacement in its place

This paper offers a critical analysis of urban displacement and acts as an introduction to the Special Feature: ‘Putting urban displacement in its place’. It begins by noting the magnitude and significance of displacement, and summarises its constituent components. Drawing upon the work of Hirsh, Eizenberg and Jabareen [2020. “A New Conceptual Framework for Understanding Displacement: Bridging the Gaps in Displacement Literature between the Global South and the Global North.” Journal of Planning Literature 35 (4): 391–407], the paper then outlines four kinds of urban displacement processes which span cities in the Global South and North: development-induced displacement, slum clearance, eviction, and gentrification. Brief consideration is also given to the significance of studentification, touristification, and austerity for driving urban displacement. Next the paper explores three crucial issues regarding the conceptualisation of urban displacement: temporality, vulnerability to displacement, and its emotional impacts. The following section discusses rehousing/resettlement and post-displacement experiences. We then examine the contested relationship between displacement and gentrification. The penultimate section outlines some of the methodological challenges in undertaking research on displacement, and also returns to the theme of placing urban displacement via a discussion of urban politics. The final section summarises the four papers in the Special Feature.

Arts promotion and Black urban displacement: Exploring the paradox of the positive in government public relations and urban renewal discourse

For decades, scholars in the United States have lamented public policies and government actions that seem to affect, intentionally or unintentionally, already marginalized Black populations. Urban renewal policies and initiatives are examples of government actions that receive such criticism. Arts promotion as a strategic public relations tactic, used to attract middle- to -upper class residents and visitors to cities, is one communicative approach cities take to sell their attractiveness and viability. Yet, cities, urban renewal, and urban tourism research has not received much attention from Public Relations researchers. Critical public relations scholars, however, can help to expose key issues such as displacement and marginalization of Black citizens that are associated with city public relations activities such as promotional culture, arts/city marketing, and urban tourism. Using racial neoliberalism as a theoretical, analytical framework, we examine urban renewal in Cincinnati, Ohio USA, to demonstrate the power of boosterish, government-sponsored urban renewal efforts and the ways such paradoxically positive discourse makes it difficult for the often Black, inner-city communities to challenge advancement that might marginalize them further.

Shelter in Place

In this article, we interrogate the representation and construction of public park space in a settler colonial city: Toronto/Tkaronto. First, we draw on the relationship between urban neoliberalism and prudentialism to demonstrate the way public health authorities in Toronto/Tkaronto promoted a neoliberal ideology of prudentialism that emphasized individual action (e.g., social distancing, personal hygiene, sheltering in place) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, we consider the extent to which this response congealed and combined with broader anxieties that were used to manage more than the virus. We focus specifically on the way these anxieties took hold in public park space, and in particular the response to encampment communities. We theorize prudentialism, as an instrument of the white settler state, to interrogate the twin processes of organized abandonment and organized violence (Gilmore 2022), which were made visible in the treatment of unhoused people amidst the pandemic in an affluent and seemingly progressive city in a nation now known as Canada. Recognizing that COVID-19 has afflicted global cities marred by real estate speculation and the continual reliance on the commodification of Indigenous Land, which has made homelessness and urban displacement a lived condition for some, we argue that public health crises result not from—and thereby cannot be solved by—prudential responsibilization, but from the willful ignorance of the neoliberal, capitalist white settler [real estate] state (Stein 2019).

Unwanted Others of the City: Counter-Cultural Production of the Roma People of Urla-Turkey

ABSTRACT This article examines a case of urban displacement and its impact on the local Roma community by uncovering the discursive strategies of the local governments and the tactical responses of the local people. Based on two-year-long ethnographic research, this study aims to understand the intricate dynamics of the counter-cultural production of the Roma people as a response to gentrification policies of local governments. The rapid rise of the rent value of land has motivated the capital class to force an exile strategy on Roma and accelerated existing segregation policies. During this time, some discursive strategies to manufacture public consent about the gentrification have circulated to change the representation of the Roma identity, replacing their imagery in mainstream society by mainly signifying them as the undeserving poor. This research aims to understand how strategic discourses and actions have positioned Roma in the societal and cultural sphere and in response, how everyday tactics of the Roma engenders counter-cultural forms through intercultural communication.

Urbanidade e Gênero: o que desloca um corpo que caminha?

ABSTRACT Urbanity and Gender: what displaces a walking body? – This article explores the relation between body and urban displacement from an intersectional feminist perspective. Based on recent studies on urbanity and gender – feminisms, art and public space – we will analyze modern and contemporary artistic practices in the city, considering the friction between gendered bodies and the city. The aim is to discuss the displacement that certain bodies establish when walking freely through the urban space.

“A Stratagem for Self-Oblivion”: Rosselli, Real Talk, and the Abolition of the “I”

This essay analyzes the poetry of Amelia Rosselli alongside accounts of urban displacement, deinstitutionalization, and political militancy. I show that Rosselli comes to see poetry as allowing for a suspension of the self that is also a way of taking distance from the demands addressed to it, including the demands that it defend itself, assert itself, pursue its interests, and reproduce the same. Poetry becomes a means of resisting ideology and its “lure of identity,” a practice on its way to what Rosselli, translating and altering a phrase from Charles Olson, calls “the abolition of the I.” Before turning to this process as it plays out in Rosselli’s poetry, I ask what gets in the way of the self’s suspension, what thwarts self-abolition, making it appear unthinkable and impossible. I take bourgeois ideology to be one answer to this question, and I argue that ideology sustains the “reparative” and “postcritical” tendencies traceable to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Analyzing a key scene in Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” that stages a refusal to read, I study the implications of this refusal and consider counterfactual alternatives.

Pemanfaatan Rumah Kompos sebagai Sarana Upgrading Keterampilan Pembuatan Pupuk Kompos

Uncontrolled population growth and urban displacement will continue to be the causes of the rise in garbage. Waste that accumulates for too long and becomes dense and scattered will cause pollution, i.e., the spread of pests and unwanted odors. The Abdimas team sees the role of compost houses as an optimal solution to provide knowledge or education while growing public interest and awareness of the importance of garbage control and reusing it to increase the economic value of partners and communities. The purpose of this activity is for the community to be able to have a positive impact on the establishment of other composite houses around it. The activities were conducted in the form of training and supporting workshops at the PCU Composite House, and follow-up of the implementation results was conducted through the visit of the Abdimas team at the location of the partner as a post-execution evaluation of the activities. Implementation of this activity is divided into three stages, namely: preparation of training, implementation of the training, and non-continued application of training results at the partner site. The training event is packed with the topic "Organic Composite Making Skills Upgrading Training". Based on the observations of the visits carried out by the Abdimas team, one of the partners is currently working on the construction of a new composite house, while the other partner site has already implemented fertilizer production activity for the fulfillment of the element of charity for the partners' crops. The construction of compost houses and garbage banks has proven to help in controlling household trash while providing economic value for partners.

Localising aid: Urban displacement, contested public authority and legitimacy in Jordan and Lebanon

AbstractGlobally, tens of millions of forcibly displaced people live in informal urban neighbourhoods. Although critical sites for humanitarian and development intervention, municipal authorities may have only a limited presence. Especially in conflict and post‐conflict settings, other non‐state actors emerge to compete for public authority. While the localisation agenda of international donors seeks to better engage local governance actors, little is known about how aid donors take account of non‐state public authority actors as they seek to achieve stability, state building, security and refugee resilience objectives. Accordingly, this study adopts a qualitative methodology to analyse how, why and to what effect donors conceive of and seek to address the legitimacy of state and non‐state urban public authority actors in their response to urban displacement. Analysis of the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan and Lebanon shows that municipalities remain the focus, as donors hold three key assumptions that inform their interventions. Adopting sophisticated tools for understanding non‐state actors' pursuit of public authority, donor interventions seek to undergird, shift, work around, blank or ban their legitimacy‐making practices. We conclude that while donors embrace empirical legitimacy approaches, development and humanitarian responses to urban protracted displacement in marginal urban neighbourhoods are restricted by powerful normative legitimacy approaches rooted in foreign policy objectives.

Neighborhood gentrification, displacement, and severe maternal morbidity in California

Gentrification, a racialized and profit-driven process in which historically disinvested neighborhoods experience an influx of development that contributes to the improvement of physical amenities, increasing housing costs, and the dispossession and displacement of existing communities, may influence the risk of severe maternal morbidity (SMM). Leveraging a racially diverse population-based sample of all live hospital births in California between 2006 and 2017, we examined associations between neighborhood-level gentrification and SMM. SMM was defined as having one of 21 procedures and diagnoses, as described in the SMM index developed by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We compared three gentrification measures to determine which operationalization best captures aspects of gentrification most salient to SMM: Freeman, Landis 3-D, and Urban Displacement Project Gentrification and Displacement Typology. Descriptive analysis assessed bivariate associations between gentrification and birthing people's characteristics. Overall and race and ethnicity-stratified mixed-effects logistic models assessed associations between gentrification and SMM, adjusting for individual sociodemographic and pregnancy factors while accounting for clustering by census tract. The study sample included 5,256,905 births, with 72,718 cases of SMM (1.4%). The percentage of individuals living in a gentrifying neighborhood ranged from 5.7% to 11.7% across exposure assessment methods. Net of individual and pregnancy-related factors, neighborhood-level gentrification, as measured by the Freeman method, was protective against SMM (OR = 0.89, 95% CI: 0.86–0.93); in comparison, gentrification, as measured by the Gentrification and Displacement Typology, was associated with greater risk of SMM (OR = 1.18, 95% CI: 1.14–1.23). These associations were significant among non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, and Hispanic individuals. Findings demonstrate that gentrification plays a role in shaping the risk of SMM among birthing people in California. Differences in how gentrification is conceptualized and measured, such as an emphasis on housing affordability compared to a broader characterization of gentrification's multiple aspects, may explain the heterogeneity in the directions of observed associations.

Protracted displacement and housing systems in intermediary cities: the case of Syrians in Torbalı, Türkiye

This article investigates the dynamics of complex housing systems within the context of large-scale protracted displacement in Turkey/Türkiye. It presents new empirical findings from a qualitative study conducted in Torbalı, a rapidly growing intermediate city with a significant population of Syrian displaced people. Drawing on theoretical and conceptual insights from housing studies, urban studies and migration studies, the article assesses the ways in which displacement materialises in place through housing and contributes to city-making and urbanisation processes informally, incrementally, and in locally and historically contingent manners. We argue that the forms and dynamics of emerging housing exhibit both continuity but most markedly significant disjuncture from past housing trajectories in Torbalı. This challenges the implicit assumption of legal uniformity of self-builders common in incremental housing debates and suggests that the notion of incremental housing has limited relevance in contexts of protracted urban displacement. Furthermore, findings underline the significance of legal dimensions in energising housing informalities; in grading socio-legal statuses of resident populations; in bounding displaced people’s mobilities; in demarcating labour flows; in moulding rental markets; and in directing the flows of housing materials. These in turn shape current and future urban built environments and mould the ways in which the urbanisation of refuge manifests.

Intimate Evictability: Urban Displacement, Familial Violence and Women’s Claim to Home in Urban Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT ‘Evictability’ describes the role urban displacements play in the governance of ‘unwanted’ citizens in Europe where eviction is imminent yet uncertain. This paper proposes ‘intimate evictability’. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the paper illuminates how the governance of the working-class poor via eviction and relocation interfaces with the intimate sphere to produce hostilities between kin. The life-stories of four women illustrate how state policies that discard the poor by denying their right to a home percolate to the home in the form of inheritance disputes and domestic violence. The dual effects of urban displacement and familial violence, the paper argues, is a gendered form of ‘slow violence’ occurring on multiple scales. This paper makes a case for why bureaucratic processes that ‘other’ the poor must be read as existing on the same continuum as acrimonious kinship relations that are about discarding unwanted women from home and family.

Walkability: a definition of quality from perception of users

This research considered walkability as an option or stage of urban displacement. The objective was to consider users’ perception of the quality of the environment for walking in urban roads, and the place chosen was the city of Canoinhas, in Santa Catarina. The method used was Quality Function Displacement (QFD), which used questionnaires applied to a sample of the population for analysis. At the end, five large groups of elements were identified that, according to the analysis, were considered more relevant for walking: 1) the existence of sidewalks; 2) the quality of the sidewalks; 3) the perception of security; 4) comfort and visual attractiveness and, 5) street quality. These groups were further divided into levels, generating 24 items that should be evaluated to improve the quality of walking.

The Gendered Effects of Urban Displacement: Insights from Delhi, India

In India, the politics of hope around slum relocation is created through claims that it would improve living standards of the poor and vulnerable families. Families, however, are not a unitary entity whose members are affected by relocation in the exact same ways. Motivated by the sets of feminist literature that problematize the family as a locus of both cooperation and conflict, and displacements as a gendered process, this article examines how forced relocation alters labor market engagements of (relocated) women, and why. Using an in-depth fieldwork-based case study of slums and a resettlement colony in Delhi, it elucidates if relocation-led sociospatial changes are reproducing gendered vulnerabilities in the city. Through that, my work underscores the need to transform the current policy into one that is gender sensitive and, hence, truly inclusive. JEL Classification: J46, R11, O20, P10

Paths of Erasure and Trails of Resistance in aNeo‐Settler‐ColonialCity

AbstractUrban displacement is receiving growing visibility within urban studies. However, most literature centres on the logic of late capitalism and tends to neglect colonial history and local resistance to displacement. This paper takes an alternative path: it relates (a) the history of colonialism and ethnic cleansing of the city of Jaffa with (b) the present‐day gentrification and displacement caused by neoliberal urbanism. To unpack this entanglement, the article focuses on political city walking tours led by Internally Displaced Palestinians in Jaffa, alongside a broader repertoire of urban subaltern tactics to reclaim it—ranging from community meetings to more overtly politicised acts of protest and initiatives to disrupt gentrification. The article therefore advances debates on urban displacement and urban citizenship mobilisation through the lens of post‐colonial theories, and by adopting a participatory interdisciplinary approach—from a novel perspective that centres local knowledge, lived experiences, and grassroots activism.