Transformative Urban Recovery
Drawing on the experiences of grassroots organisations, international agencies and other key urban stakeholders over the course of the pandemic, the Transformative Urban Recovery (TUR) framework provides a unifying urban vision to inform and resource urban recovery processes.
In the coming months, IIED will be releasing a series of publications on the framework and partnering with Cities Alliance, WIEGO, Slum Dwellers International (SDI), the Coalition for Urban Transitions and ICLEI to host a series of thematic meetings and events in key urban policy spaces, including the UN climate summit (COP26) and the World Urban Forum.
Find out more about the framework in the recent blog, COVID-19 in cities: pathways towards a transformative urban recovery, and download the issue paper.
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Wanted: an inclusive vision of urban recovery from COVID-19
As part of the launch of the Transformative Urban Recovery framework, Wanted: an inclusive vision of urban recovery from COVID-19 - episode 12 of IIED’s Make Change Happen podcast - brings together expert practitioners to discuss the effects of the pandemic in urban areas, and share a range of inclusive, locally led responses from the global South.
Listen to the podcast now.
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Community-led housing practices - a pathway for more caring and just urban futures
A recent IIED webinar saw over 300 people from more than 30 countries discuss community-led housing practices across the global South. Part of the IIED Debates series, the webinar was co-hosted with the magazine Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil and the Citizenship School of Polis Institute, and included panelists leading community-housing efforts in Brazil, Sierra Leone and Thailand.
The webinar was chaired by IIED principal researcher Alexandre Frediani, who emphasized the importance of community-led housing research and engagement as “a way of standing with social movements and amplifying the message that solutions to the global housing crisis must include those who are excluded from or made vulnerable by current housing systems. […] Community led housing offers a tangible alternative to dominant housing policy and practice.”
Watch the full webinar and take a look at key moments from the discussion in IIED's Twitter thread from the event. |
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The road from refugee to resident
To mark the recent World Refugee Day, IIED published The road from refugee to resident, which highlights how working with displaced people can help create more inclusive and sustainable cities. The longread draws on a range of research that IIED is doing on displacement and covers some preliminary findings from the ESRC funded ‘Protracted Displacement in an Urban World’ project in Afghanistan and Ethiopia.
Read the longread now.
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Innovate4Cities Conference
The virtual Innovate4Cities Conference will take place 11-15 October 2021, bringing together over 1,000 city leaders, scientists, researchers, innovators, academics, youth, and private sector representatives to advance pragmatic and action oriented research and science that will help cities reduce their carbon footprint and increase resilience to climate change.
The conference aims to bolster knowledge co-creation and innovative solutions implementation and to mobilise the transformative potential of cities towards zero-carbon and climate resilient cities, as they build back better in their COVID-19 recovery plans.
The call for submissions has just been launched at www.innovate4cities.org/2021.
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Human Settlements Group news
Strategy Refresh
In April 2021, IIED's Human Settlements Group (HSG) hosted a virtual event for partners, donors and friends of the group to introduce our refreshed strategy. Researchers reflected on their thematic areas of focus, the importance of partnerships and identified cross-cutting areas of work.
Panellists Beth Chitekwe-Biti (SDI), Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio (climate resilience consultant) and Stefanie Barratt (Samuel Hall) discussed how the themes fit into the wider urban context, the way in which HSG can support their partners, and shared their thoughts on future opportunities.
To learn more about each thematic area, watch the following short videos: Housing Justice, Urban Crises and Protracted Displacement, Building Urban Resilience, Urban Health Equity and Urban Poverty and Informality, as well as this video highlighting some of HSG’s recent projects with partners.
A changing team
Over the past 6 months, we have welcomed new staff members: researcher Tucker Landesman and two senior coordinators, Gillian Valentine and Jessica Stewart. The team also said a sad goodbye to senior coordinator Alex Norodom, who left the team after 5 years. |
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Project news
Protracted Displacement in an Urban World
This ESRC-GCRF research project offers a large scale comparative study of refugee wellbeing and livelihoods in cities and camps across four countries that host large numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Jordan, and Kenya. The project is currently in its data collection phase with the survey completed in Afghanistan and Ethiopia, ongoing in Kenya, and being planned for Jordan. The updated Protracted Displacement in an Urban World project website launched on World Refugee Day.
Transformative Urban Coalitions
Transformative Urban Coalitions brings IIED and partners together to develop, test and disseminate a scalable approach for achieving key shifts in urban development, putting cities on a path to achieve climate justice and zero-carbon emissions.
The Urban Refugee Dividend
The urban refugee dividend – rethinking humanitarian aid as urban WASH investment looks at the issue of forced displacement through a new lens. It will model what could be achieved for refugees and their hosts if resources spent on camp populations were invested in services and infrastructure in towns and cities hosting refugees instead.
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Recent blogs
Pandemics, housing crisis and the value of community-led housing initiatives in the global south, by IIED researchers Alexandre Apsan Frediani and Tucker Landesman, with PhD researcher Thaisa Comelli, was published in the ‘Cidades do Amanhã’ (Cities of Tomorrow) blog series from Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil. The blog is also available in Portuguese.
Following a devastating fire in Susan's Bay, Freetown, Joseph McCarthy and Mary Kamara from SLURC wrote, Fire disaster makes more than 1,000 homeless in Freetown, on how the Susan’s Bay fire highlights the insecurity and lack of access to basic services faced by residents of Sierra Leone's informal settlements.
In the blog Getting attention to a much-neglected health agenda: occupational health and safety, IIED partner Rangarirai Machemedze and David Satterthwaite discuss key findings on the occupational health and climate change risks facing informal residents and workers in Harare and Masvingo - part of our NIHR-funded project Addressing risks facing informal workers in Zimbabwe and India.
The most recent blogs in The transition to a predominantly urban world series curated by David Satterthwaite include: 'Feeding all city inhabitants' (Cecilia Tacoli), ‘Broadening the understanding and measurement of urban poverty’ (with Diana Mitlin) and ‘The often forgotten role of small and intermediate urban centres’. The series also features guest blogs on informal settlements by Sheela Patel and Arif Hasan.
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Publications
Resilience Reset: Creating Resilient Cities in the Global South, a new book by Aditya V. Bahadur and Thomas Tanner, draws on evidence from urban resilience initiatives around the globe. The authors make a compelling argument for a "resilience reset" - a pause and stocktake that critically examines the concepts, practices and challenges of building resilience, particularly in cities of the global South.
A paper co-authored by Lucy Earle with Dyfed Aubrey, Isis Nuñez Ferrera and Stephanie Loose was published in Refugee Survey Quarterly V39 Issue 4. In When Internal Displacement Meets Urbanisation: Making Cities Work for Internally Displaced People the authors propose re-conceptualising internally displaced peoples' (IDPs) movements as an accelerated version of an inevitable and widespread trend towards urbanisation, opening up opportunities to work with and in support of municipal authorities to deploy a range of urban planning and legal tools that can meet both IDP needs and urban development challenges.
The latest issue of Environment and Urbanization was published in April 2021. Education and learning for inclusive development explores education in urban areas, which has a major, complex role in promoting both inclusive development and social exclusion.
Alexandre Apsan Frediani co-authored a paper with Lori Keleher in Participatory Research, Capabilities and Epistemic Justice titled Epistemic Capabilities in the Context of Oppression: Reflections from an Action Learning Programme in Salvador, Brazil. The paper analyses the impact of drug trafficking and violence in Salvador and how these have influenced the international action learning programme striving towards the right to the city in Salvador.
Alexandre Apsan Frediani co-authored a working paper with Charley Nussey titled A protocol for Participatory Action Research into Universities' Role in Climate Justice: Principles and tools. The paper was developed collaboratively with partners involved in the GCRF funded research project Climate-U. This protocol aims to explore five parallel sets of principles and tools for developing Participatory Action Research (PAR) with a climate justice lens, and it is also available in Portuguese.
A short essay on feminist grassroots responses in urban areas, written by Alice Sverdlik, was included in a new Essays on Equality from KCL’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership on Covid-19: the road to a gender equal recovery.
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