Prof. Dr. David Kaufmann | Spatial Development and Urban Policy

Housing in Urban Humanitarian Crises

Urban humanitarian housing is one of the most significant challenges for today’s humanitarian actors, who are seeking new ways of providing adequate housing for displaced persons in cities. At the same time, a growing number of refugees are struggling to find affordable and dignified housing, often resorting to dwelling in informal neighborhoods.

This project seeks to generate new perspectives on the housing situation of displaced persons in Bogotá, Colombia, and Beirut, Lebanon, in an effort to make a transformative contribution to improve humanitarian housing responses as well as the lives, well-being, and agency of displaced persons.

Firstly, the project is interested in investigating how national policymakers, local authorities and organizations, international humanitarian and market actors understand and attempt to meet the housing needs of displaced persons in cities (RQ1). Secondly, the project turns its attention to how different displaced persons articulate and cope with their housing needs and how they may be constrained or empowered to meet them (RQ2). These questions help articulate the incongruity between how displaced people dwell and how different actors respond to their housing needs in processes of varying degrees of (in)formality. The project thinks about these two questions transversally, which allows us to hone in on those operating as mediators between housing providers and those seeking access to housing (such as landlords and market actors). With an interdisciplinary team of academics in Lebanon, Colombia, and Switzerland and a mixed methods approach, the project seeks to shed light on the nexus of housing needs among diverse groups of displaced persons and humanitarian responses within increasingly complex and protracted urban displacement crises.

Through a transdisciplinary approach that includes close collaboration with humanitarian and development organizations as well as the participation of local actors in knowledge production, the project aims to make a transformative contribution to improve humanitarian housing responses as well as the lives, well-being, and agency of displaced persons.