The Unknown City: the (in)visibility of urban displacement

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Public attention is typically focused at the minority of forced migrants who are able to cross an international border and claim refugee status, although the large majority of forced migrants remain within their countries of origin. A growing number of people at a global scale are seeking shelter in cities, particularly poor areas of cities in poor countries. Urban displacement may result from political instability, environmental stress or extreme absolute poverty in areas nearby the city, or as a result of policies of forced eviction within the city. People who are forced to move to or within the city are rarely welcome in the areas where they end up. They are often forced to live in low quality housing where disease and crime are more common than in the city as a whole. To make matters worse, they are frequently blamed for those problems by city authorities. In extreme cases, where forced displacements raise highly racialised tensions, forced migrants may face eviction or even complete removal from the city. For these reasons forced migrants may prefer to try to remain hidden and the city offers plenty of opportunities to do so. Yet invisibility also raises challenges and if individuals are not visible to state and civil society institutions they may not receive the support they need. This raises a tension between visibility and invisibility. This project explores when, how and why forced migrants to poor areas of cities prefer to remain invisible. It also considers attitudes of city authorities who frequently have very little information and almost no direct experience of living in such neighbourhoods. Official responses to the (in)visibility of displaced people range from solidarity and support to repression. This project is concerned with the visual. These underserved areas of cities frequently remain unknown even to city authorities. Research will develop comparative fieldwork in selected neighbourhoods in Colombo, Dhaka, Harare and Hargeisa, working with excellent partners in each city. These cities all have long histories of forced migration from neighbouring areas and within the cities themselves. The project is concerned with a multi-level analysis, focused on different scales of (in)visibility. This may vary from individual forced migrants, to city level authorities via the common practice of collective or community organisations within particular neighbourhoods. At each of these three scales individuals or groups have a choice to remain invisible, to hide away and avoid official contact, or to make themselves visible through strategies of protesting or claiming rights. These scales intersect with three sets of questions that investigate first how much decision making forced migrants actually have, second, how these processes have developed over time and third, how different individuals experience, perceive and imagine space differently. This leads to a series of innovative methods, exploring visual representations, graphic accounts of forced migration, and cartographic accounts of individuals and local residents association. The project will contribute to changing ways of thinking about the city, and particularly the place of forced migration in the cities. Ongoing engagement with city authorities will help to challenge understandings of forced migrants as deceitful or parasitic, which remains extremely widespread. It will also contribute to the broader project of 'global urbanism' highlighting how cities in poorer countries have begun to challenge assumptions of the universality of theories developed in North America and Western Europe. Forced migration is a particularly common occurrence in cities in Africa and Asia and the project aims to draw on that to develop new theoretical understandings of urban displacement.