Humanitarian Cities in Flux

If cities hum with enterprise and possibility, refugee settlements tend to stifle with sameness and stagnation. “We don’t have anything to do,” Congolese refugees often lamented to me in the Ugandan refugee camp where I worked in the early 2000s. Far more than their difficult living conditions, inadequate food, or subpar medical care—or the miles they walked to the bore hole for water—what they complained about was the feeling of being stuck. Many—especially the young or formerly professional class—eventually exchanged life in the camp for Kampala, the capital city. There was no aid available for them there, but the tradeoff was worth it. They wanted a life that felt like it was in motion.

The number of refugees living in cities around the world has been increasing significantly for decades, as many make the same choice, leaving sprawling camps like Dadaab or Zaatari for cities like Cairo, Athens, Beirut, Dar es Salaam, or Nairobi. Little research has been done to understand how tens of millions of refugees taking up residence in our planet’s biggest cities are shaping—and being shaped by—these host cities. In her new book, Host Cities: How Refugees Are Transforming the World’s Urban Settings, political scientist Karen Jacobsen explores how they are transforming the urban landscape but also how to adapt infrastructure and funding systems for the betterment of refugees and locals alike.

The Humanitarian Influx

Though drawing from decades of research across the globe, Jacobsen focuses primarily on two case studies: Cairo, Egypt, a megalopolis; and Tripoli, Lebanon, a “second city.” Her area of interest is what she calls “a humanitarian influx,” defined as more than 10,000 refugees arriving to a city in a short period of time. The particular impacts and considerations of this population, she argues, are distinct from other migrants, who tend to arrive in smaller numbers over longer periods of time.

Jacobsen gives us Tripoli and Cairo as full-blooded characters, with complex histories and topographies and political designs. She is deft at compressing history, showing the sociopolitical dynamics that played out in Lebanon prior to the arrival of Syrians in the 2010s, for instance, as well as the evolution of the city of Cairo over centuries into the sprawling metropolis and collection of satellite cities that creep toward the desert expanse. These urban histories are the backdrop against which the refugees arrive, informing where and how they live and how their neighbors accept or resist them, and against which the refugees attempt—and struggle—to build their lives. But cities are not static. For host communities, refugees represent another layer of history atop the city, new problems, and webs of complexity: a spike in garbage to dispose of, for instance, or increasing rents, heightened food scarcity, and overcrowded schools.

Blessedly, the book is less about the challenges created than how new arrivals can be—or can become—benefits to their new (even if temporary) home. As she demonstrates, refugees must often exhibit great ingenuity when arriving in a new city, whether in finding jobs or—if formal work is prohibited for refugees, as is often the case—starting businesses of their own. Beyond the more familiar small shops, restaurants, and food stalls, this also includes more unexpected ventures: a Sudanese man arranging health tourism for people in Sudan who can’t get proper care back home, or the Syrian man who launched Rosto, a wildly popular fast food chain in Cairo that caters to Syrians and Egyptians alike. This entrepreneurialism actually bolsters local economies, and also connects cities with transnational networks. Jacobsen also lays out a variety of more incidental impacts that refugees have: the influx of humanitarian workers with high salaries and money to spend, the increased connections with economies abroad, the benefits of informal economies, and the overall increase in consumers that leads to more money circulating in the economy. How, I wondered while reading, might these be better highlighted within host countries to associate the benefits with the refugees’ arrival?

Jacobsen highlights two specific refugees: Mahmoud, a Syrian who became stranded in Tripoli once the passenger ferries to Turkey were shuttered, and Hassan, a worker for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and tutor from Somalia living in a Cairo high-rise. The two serve as excellent guides into the transformations, hardships, and possibilities of life in these cities. Jacobsen’s narrative writing is moving and propulsive, as in a passage in which Mahmoud encounters a fence at the port, for instance, or when she follows Hassan from a bus station toward one of Cairo’s satellite cities in the desert:

There is a short stretch where green fields of vegetables and palm trees relieve the bleak desert sand. But this greenness is shrinking as the cities of Giza and 6th of October expand toward each other, and soon the desert resumes until the sand-colored concrete buildings of 6th of October City emerge like a mirage.

Redefining the Problem

For refugees to thrive in still-thriving cities, Jacobsen argues, we need to reconsider the policies and practices of funders, humanitarian organizations, local governments, and both host and refugee communities, so that refugees and locals alike can become beneficiaries.

Take food assistance. Twenty years ago, it was common for refugees to receive humanitarian aid in the form of weekly food distributions; I remember huge sacks of subsidized corn (emblazoned with “Gift of the USA”) that had been shipped across the world to the World Food Program in the Kyaka II Refugee Camp in 2004, for instance, and how enterprising refugees would rip the sacks into panels that they’d use to waterproof their roofs. But now, as she outlines, the increasingly common practice is to offer cash assistance instead of food, allowing refugees more agency over what they are buying, how much, and when, as well as ensuring that instead of surplus corn, they are buying from vendors in the local community. She advocates for continued implementation and growth of such programs that put money directly into the hands of refugees for maximum benefit of both refugees and host communities.

This reimagination of how humanitarian aid functions, Jacobsen compellingly argues, is already underway but is only becoming more and more and more crucial. Many host countries already struggle with poverty and inequality, and the great sums of humanitarian aid that tend to quickly follow refugee arrivals can foment resentment among locals who struggle to make ends meet. For this reason, she argues, donor organizations must more thoughtfully comingle the humanitarian aid to refugees and development sector funds aimed at the host country itself. This is best done at the local level, where real impacts can be best felt and seen, she argues.

Going Local

One compelling case study she offers of this dual investment in action took place in Lebanon, where the Norwegian Refugee Council began giving housing assistance to both high-need refugees and their local neighbors. The organization also provided funding to landlords for remodeling and expansion projects, allowing them to create new and better units as incentive for renting to refugees.

Another dual investment program she highlights is UNHCR’s power plant outside the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Not only does it power the camp, but also it routes excess power back to the Jordanian grid—providing both a concrete resource and goodwill to the host community.

Xenophobic politicians are most successful when they manipulate supporters into blaming refugees for these conditions that predate their arrival, thus shifting attention from root causes for which the political class might be blamed.

In Jacobsen’s estimation, humanitarian support for refugees should always consider how to mutually benefit host communities as in the examples above. Such programs provide “both tangible and symbolic” support to the host communities, thus improving relations, as the Norwegian Refugee Council put it.

“There is plenty of evidence,” Jacobsen writes, “that the best way to help refugees is to promote good relations with their neighbors by spreading humanitarian resources so that both locals and refugees benefit. This is both effective and fair.” Such programs can transform the profile of the refugee, helping them to be seen as an asset rather than a burden.

At times, Jacobsen herself defaults to seeing refugees as burdens. Several times, she invites the reader into a thought experiment—a bunch of Canadians suddenly arrive in your town, for example—whose inevitable endpoint is the xenophobic rejection of refugees, blaming the newcomers for personal woes. “What would happen in your own neighborhood, reader,” she writes elsewhere, “if an outside group who did not speak your language moved in, took over the local watering holes, and began practicing animal sacrifice on the high school sports field? How quickly would neighbors start calling the police, and how soon would the group become pariahs?”

To be sure, the sudden arrival of large numbers of people—particularly when underresourced and fleeing violence or emergency—is no small thing. Jacobsen narrates how, after millions of Syrians arrived in Lebanon after 2012, the unemployment rate doubled and 170,000 Lebanese newly fell below the poverty line. But for all that, she makes the case that refugees can be both seen and felt as assets—if a city does things right. Host Cities could devote more attention to the sources of existing social inequities in host countries, which aren’t just unhappy accidents, after all, but functions of preexisting corruption, inequality, and other social and structural designs. Xenophobic politicians are most successful when they manipulate supporters into blaming refugees for these conditions that predate their arrival, thus shifting attention from root causes for which the political class might be blamed.

There were more than 108 million forcibly displaced people across the world at the end of 2022, as Jacobsen observes, staggering numbers that will likely only increase, due to climate change alone. In a world of increasing forced migration, especially to cities, refugees are simply a given fact of our world, no matter how much host governments may attempt to “close” borders. If they are a humanitarian—and thus a legal and moral—responsibility, this book’s greatest contribution is in offering frameworks for understanding how they can also be assets to well-organized, well-supported, and willing host countries.