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

公众的注意力通常集中在少数被迫移徙者身上，他们能够越过国际边界并申请难民地位，尽管绝大多数被迫移徙者仍留在原籍国。在全球范围内，越来越多的人在城市中寻求庇护，特别是在贫穷国家城市的贫穷地区。城市流离失所可能是由于城市附近地区的政治不稳定、环境压力或极端赤贫，或由于城市内的强迫驱逐政策。被迫迁往城市或在城市内流动的人在他们最终到达的地区很少受到欢迎。他们往往被迫住在质量低劣的住房里，那里的疾病和犯罪比整个城市都要普遍。更糟糕的是，他们经常被市政当局归咎于这些问题。在极端情况下，强迫流离失所会引发高度种族化的紧张局势，被迫移徙者可能面临被驱逐，甚至被完全赶出城市。由于这些原因，被迫移民可能更愿意设法保持隐蔽，而城市提供了大量这样做的机会。然而，不为人所知也带来了挑战，如果国家和民间社会机构看不到个人，他们可能得不到所需的支持。这引起了可见性和不可见性之间的紧张关系。该项目探讨了被迫迁移到城市贫困地区的移民何时、如何以及为什么宁愿不被发现。它还考虑了城市当局的态度，他们往往对这些街区的生活知之甚少，几乎没有直接的经验。官方对流离失所者能见度的反应从声援和支持到镇压。这个项目与视觉有关。城市中这些服务不足的地区甚至连市政当局都不知道。研究将在科隆博、达卡、哈拉雷和哈尔格萨的选定街区开展比较实地工作，并与每个城市的优秀伙伴合作。这些城市都有从邻近地区和城市内部被迫迁移的长期历史。该项目涉及多层次的分析，侧重于不同的可见度。这可能因个人被迫移徙者而异，也可能因城市一级当局在特定街区内集体或社区组织的共同做法而异。在这三个层面上，个人或群体都可以选择保持隐形，躲藏起来，避免官方接触，或者通过抗议或要求权利的策略使自己引人注目。这些尺度与三组问题相交，第一，调查被迫移民实际上有多少决策，第二，这些过程如何随着时间的推移而发展，第三，不同的个人如何体验，感知和想象空间不同。这导致了一系列创新的方法，探索视觉表现，被迫迁移的图形帐户，以及个人和当地居民协会的地图帐户。该项目将有助于改变人们对城市的看法，特别是对城市中被迫移徙地点的看法。与城市当局的持续接触将有助于挑战将被迫移徙者理解为欺骗性或寄生性的观念，这种观念仍然极为普遍。它还将有助于更广泛的“全球城市化”项目，突出贫困国家的城市如何开始挑战北美和西欧发展的理论的普遍性假设。被迫移徙在非洲和亚洲的城市中特别常见，该项目旨在利用这一点，对城市流离失所问题形成新的理论认识。

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.