Ten observations on the Challenges of Humanitarian Work in Urban Settings

Approximately 3.3 billion of the world’s inhabitants presently live in urban areas—a figure expected to increase to more than five billion people in the next twenty years. Perhaps a third of today’s urban residents live in informal settlements and slums which increases their vulnerability to crises. While humanitarian actors have delivered assistance in urban settings in the past (e.g. Sarajevo), the pace of urbanization and the increasing complexity of urban life mean that it is likely that future humanitarian operations will increasingly be carried out in cities. The Inter-Agency Standing Committee, UNHCR, and other international agencies have sought to develop new strategies and policies to respond to this new reality. In these brief remarks, I’d like to offer ten observations on the urban context and the way this may affect humanitarian approaches to protection in urban settings. While I’ll illustrate some of my comments with reference to Haiti, I suspect they will be applicable to other settings.