The Unknown City: the (in)visibility of urban displacement

Public attention is typically focused at the minority of forced migrants who are able to cross an international border and claim refugee status, although the large majority of forced migrants remain within their countries of origin. A growing number of people at a global scale are seeking shelter in cities, particularly poor areas of cities in poor countries. Urban displacement may result from political instability, environmental stress or extreme absolute poverty in areas nearby the city, or as a result of policies of forced eviction within the city. People who are forced to move to or within the city are rarely welcome in the areas where they end up. They are often forced to live in low quality housing where disease and crime are more common than in the city as a whole. To make matters worse, they are frequently blamed for those problems by city authorities. In extreme cases, where forced displacements raise highly racialised tensions, forced migrants may face eviction or even complete removal from the city. For these reasons forced migrants may prefer to try to remain hidden and the city offers plenty of opportunities to do so. Yet invisibility also raises challenges and if individuals are not visible to state and civil society institutions they may not receive the support they need. This raises a tension between visibility and invisibility. This project explores when, how and why forced migrants to poor areas of cities prefer to remain invisible. It also considers attitudes of city authorities who frequently have very little information and almost no direct experience of living in such neighbourhoods. Official responses to the (in)visibility of displaced people range from solidarity and support to repression.

This project is concerned with the visual. These underserved areas of cities frequently remain unknown even to city authorities. Research will develop comparative fieldwork in selected neighbourhoods in Colombo, Dhaka, Harare and Hargeisa, working with excellent partners in each city. These cities all have long histories of forced migration from neighbouring areas and within the cities themselves. The project is concerned with a multi-level analysis, focused on different scales of (in)visibility. This may vary from individual forced migrants, to city level authorities via the common practice of collective or community organisations within particular neighbourhoods. At each of these three scales individuals or groups have a choice to remain invisible, to hide away and avoid official contact, or to make themselves visible through strategies of protesting or claiming rights. These scales intersect with three sets of questions that investigate first how much decision making forced migrants actually have, second, how these processes have developed over time and third, how different individuals experience, perceive and imagine space differently. This leads to a series of innovative methods, exploring visual representations, graphic accounts of forced migration, and cartographic accounts of individuals and local residents association.

The project will contribute to changing ways of thinking about the city, and particularly the place of forced migration in the cities. Ongoing engagement with city authorities will help to challenge understandings of forced migrants as deceitful or parasitic, which remains extremely widespread. It will also contribute to the broader project of 'global urbanism' highlighting how cities in poorer countries have begun to challenge assumptions of the universality of theories developed in North America and Western Europe. Forced migration is a particularly common occurrence in cities in Africa and Asia and the project aims to draw on that to develop new theoretical understandings of urban displacement.

Four non-academic audiences are targeted:
1. International stakeholders: UN agencies, international NGOs
2. Influential actors in each city: eg. representatives of local government, planning office, police,
3. Collective organisations in selected neighbourhoods: eg. residents' associations
4. General public and education sectors: national and international media, senior high school and undergraduate.

Eight tools are planned to engage with these four key target audiences.
1. Engagement with forced migrants and residents of target neighbourhoods: much of the communications and engagement with residents will come through research engagement, that is interviews, walks and participatory mapping on the Ushahidi platform. This process will require a clear explanation of the aims and objectives of the research and feedback on these topics will be noted carefully as an integral part of the research process. The results of all these activities will be communicated back to research participants, particularly through the use of graphic accounts of the migration process and perspectives on the two neighbourhoods.
2. Project website: established and maintained by the communications team at the RGS-IBG. This will be a development of the current Migrants on the Margins introductory site (http://tinyurl.com/ojvnjxu) and will be shared by all research funded under the Migrants on the Margins programme. It will provide the main window onto the research for all stakeholders with Internet access. It will introduce all partner institutions and team members, provide basic information on research design and questions and showcase the following two communications tools.
3. Blog posts written by members of the research team will be posted regularly and communicated widely through social media. They will discuss research decisions and experiences at all stages of the research process. They will be edited as an educational resource for upper level school students and undergraduates.
4. Graphic accounts are a particularly innovative way of communicating individual accounts of forced migration. They can be developed from several accounts in order to fully respect anonymity and disguise identities without sacrificing details. They can also be easily communicated to forced migrants themselves, as a way of reflecting on the oral histories they have previously provided. They thus provide both a research tool and a dissemination/impact tool. PositiveNegatives have a great deal of experience of using such accounts in a variety of challenging contexts
5. Maps will be used in a variety of formats. Like graphic accounts they provide a way of reflecting on individual experience in a way that camouflages individual identity. Individual maps will be constructed from individual oral histories and accompanied walks and neighbourhood maps will be produced in collaboration with neighbourhood associations. Finally, city maps or urban plans will be analysed as part of the historical profile of each city.
6. Community archives will allow engagement of residents associations in identifying, validating and preserving knowledge about the community.
7. Open access publications will communicate a greater complexity of detail and argument to a more specialised audience. Ten working papers will be produced during the life of the project, two led by the PI and one each by the eight CoIs. These will be developed into peer reviewed journal articles, though published after the period of project funding ends.
8. Exhibition: the final exhibition will contain visual materials produced throughout the project, particularly graphic accounts of forced migration, maps of individual, community and city level and associated photographs. It will provide a method of communicating results but also a point of encounter to discuss those results. It will initially appear at the RGS-IBG in London but funding for this project will allow it to travel widely.