Cities and Displacement (Themenheft)

Dick, Eva / Einhard Schmidt-Kallert / Benjamin Schraven
External Publications (2022)

in: Trialog - a journal for planning and building in a global context 140-141 (Januar 2022)

Cities are at the forefront of responding to forced migration and do so in highly varied ways. Only one third of the world’s more than 20 million refugees presently live in camps; the majority settle in urban areas and peri-urban settlements, largely in developing regions in the Global South. An even larger amount of internally displaced people live in cit- ies. Due to a universal trend towards protracted displacement, cities are becoming increasingly important spaces of integration. This is also recognised at the level of global policies. For example, the New Urban Agenda (2016) promulgated at the Habitat III Conference stressed the responsibility of cities to promoting the rights of migrants and refu- gees, and the UN’s Global Compact of Refugees (2018) called for ‘out-of-camp’ solutions to forced migration. The main focus of this special issue is cities and urbanising areas – including camps – in the Global South. This, however, does not imply that we ignore refugee movements in the Global North. After all, TRIALOG is published in Germany, a country in which the domestic policy discourse of recent years has been heavily shaped by the massive influx of refugees in 2015. Thus, three articles in this issue relate to the German scene.