Urbanisation, Displacement & Humanitarian Action - Paper presented at the 2. World Conference of Humanitarian Studies, June 2-5 2011, Boston

Urbanisation is one the mega trends of our time: more than 3 billion people, the majority of the world’s population, will live in cities within this decade. The pace of urbanisation is much faster in the developing world, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa. Already now, more than 1 billion people live in urban slums. Forced migration is one important driver of urbanisation, both in cases of large-scale displacement to urban areas but also in the case formerly rural dwellers chose to settle in town when they return. As forced migrants increasingly chose to go to towns and cities, we are likely to see more displacement to so-called urban areas in the future.