Safe and sustainable cities: human security, migration, and well-being

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This project seeks to incorporate migrant perspectives and sources of innovation into urban planning to build safer and more sustainable cities. The project represents frontier research in framing new migrant populations as sources of innovation and sustainability, and in using multiple methods to incorporate new migrant population perspectives into sustainable places. The research addresses environmental sustainability by examining the environmental risks to new populations in cities, including exposure to environmental hazards and access to environmental services such as water. Its addresses poverty by examining social exclusion of migrant populations that are often invisible in policy and planning. It addresses conflict and security by conceptualizing the human security of migrant populations as their ability to create secure lives, overcome discrimination, and build social cohesion in destination areas. The research design involves examining human security and overcoming exclusion with example groups in a rapidly expanding city in a low-income country; working directly with migrant populations and urban planners to generate new priorities; and learning lessons that can be generalized and applied across the Global South. The planned research involves planners in Chittagong in coastal Bangladesh and its new migrant populations, including some displaced because of environmental hazards, and ethnic minority groups. The research involves multiple methods: surveys of migrants focusing on their well-being, their sources of insecurity, and their potential to build attachment to sustainable places; photo-elicitation with both planners and migrants as participants; and deliberative workshops to build empathy between migrants and planners and designing new interventions. The research builds on and seeks new directions for the fields of human security, migration, urban planning, and development studies.