Can humanitarian responses in urban areas reinforce underlying causes of vulnerability? Tweaking a livelihoods analysis of inequality and infrastructure in splintering cities

International humanitarian agencies are often mandated to target the most vulnerable. This, combined with short funding cycles, encourages extractive assessments of individualized vulnerability; responses based on delivering individual packages of household assets; and only superficial consideration of power relationships. By analogy with urban infrastructure provision, this paper argues that narrow interpretation of the sustainable livelihoods framework applied to urban analysis gives only limited insights into the systemic risks faced by urban dwellers. Using an analysis of infrastructure that draws on the idea of splintering urbanism, a process by which urban infrastructure tends to privilege some and bypass others, the paper develops a visual framework for considering the interdependence of urban livelihoods, physical infrastructure and the organizing tendencies of powerful service providers. The paper concludes that in the cases where it is not possible to identify the most vulnerable (e.g. in dense, heterogeneous cities) or where it is possible only to identify the most vulnerable but not to deliver asset packages to them (e.g. transitional shelter kits that cannot be received by people without access to a plot), humanitarian activities risk reinforcing the systemic, underlying causes of vulnerability.