Refugee Cities - Incite at Columbia University

The expanding number of internationally displaced people settling in cities and interacting with and in urban spaces across the globe merits sustained engagement and analysis.

Part of the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference, the Refugee Cites working group hosts discussions and public programming that center the social, political, and material interrelatedness of refugees and cities in different geographies. The group’s core members include researchers and educators who have come together to collaborate on various projects at the intersection of urban and refugee studies, including public symposia, and to engage in mutually enriching discussions and forge lasting intellectual and professional ties.

Cities are generally conceptualized as permanent, modern, and planned. They are governed by nation-states and are part of complex networks of global capital and knowledge. In contrast, the spaces where refugees settle (or are settled) are generally considered temporary. However, this does not match the actual experience of refugees, since many come from and inhabit cities.

Refugee communities have become involved in urban housing movements in places like São Paulo, a city with a long history of urban occupations and informal settlements. Beginning in the aughts, “urban refugee” surfaced as a category of concern in policy (UNHCR 2009; 2012) and humanitarian discourses but remains under-explored in scholarly research, especially since the majority of the world’s refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) live in cities.

Conversely, refugees displaced by persecution, violence, and war(s) often spend open-ended periods in sprawling settlements that are functionally urban places and actively take part in place-making processes generally associated with permanent municipalities.

A central aim of this interdisciplinary working group is to reflect collectively and critically about the different analytical levels at which to examine the lives of internationally displaced people and communities, who, while often stateless, are inhabitants of “city-states,” nation-states, and other complex, overlapping jurisdictions. We address such pressing issues of humanistic and humanitarian concern in the status and deep history of sanctuary cities, the extent of and limitations to national sovereignty, and struggles for the right to the city. 

The working group is interested in examining these urban sites as spaces of reception, rejection, hypervisibility, and invisibility. The manner in which refugees manage and are managed in these sites is also often structured by social relations and formal and informal economies. As a group that includes scholars whose research has investigated cities both past and present, Refugee Cities is interested in thinking about the ways in which internationally displaced people settle in cities as part of a long history of the improvised, often dissident use of urban space and the historical construction of social inequality across different geographic scales.