Urban Resettlements in the Global South

Lived Experiences of Housing and Infrastructure between Displacement and Relocation

Raffael Beier, Amandine Spire, Marie Bridonneau, Raffael Beier, Amandine Spire, Marie Bridonneau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000434309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Planificación de ciudades y desarrollo urbano

Urban Resettlements in the Global South provides new perspectives on resettlement through an urban studies lens. To date, resettlement has been theorised through development studies and refugee studies, but urban resettlement is also a major dimension of urban development in the Global South and may help to rethink contemporary urban dynamics between spectacular new town developments and rising incidences of eviction and displacement. Conceptualising resettlement as a binding notion between production/regeneration and destruction/demolition of urban space helps to illuminate interdependencies and to underline significant ambiguities within affected people's perspectives towards resettlement projects. This volume will offer an interesting selection of ten different case studies with rich empirical data from Latin America, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, focused on each stage of resettlement (before, during, after relocation) through different timescales. By offering a frame for analysing and rethinking resettlement within urban studies, it will support any scholar or expert dealing with resettlement, displacement, and housing in an urban context, seeking to improve housing and planning policies in and for the city.

1

Introduction

Positioning “Urban Resettlement” in the Global Urban South

Raffael Beier, Amandine Spire, Marie Bridonneau and Corentin Chanet

DOI: 10.4324/9781003124559-1

Urban development in the Global South has gained momentum in light of global trends such as rapid urbanisation, mounting global competition among cities for increasingly mobile capital, a New Urban Agenda, and a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) directed at building sustainable cities. Cities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are undergoing unprecedented transformations. In various countries, political and economic elites escape congested and unsafe megacities towards private enclaves and even entirely new capital cities (Carmody and Owusu 2016; Grant 2015; van Noorloos and Kloosterboer 2018; Shatkin 2008). At the same time, new skyscrapers, waterfronts, large-scale infrastructure, and other flagship architecture are reshaping the inner cities of emerging metropoles such as Beirut, Cape Town, Mumbai, and Addis Ababa. Both trends reveal an attempt to move away from the negative image of the megacity by propagating new representations of cities linked to modernity, development, and hubs for national wealth (Côté-Roy and Moser 2019; Robinson 2002; Roy and Ong 2011; Watson 2014). These practices of neoliberal city-making and worlding place pressure on slum dwellers, street traders, and other urban dwellers that supposedly embody elitist conceptions of urban congestion and backwardness (Huchzermeyer 2011; Parnell and Pieterse 2010; Roever and Skinner 2016; Roy 2014; Spire and Choplin 2018). Consequently, new satellite cities and large-scale housing developments at the cities’ peripheries have been accommodating a growing population that struggles to (re-)access modernised, central urban spaces (Buckley, Kallergis, and Wainer 2016; Croese, Cirolia, and Graham 2016; Turok 2016).

Against this backdrop of rapid and fundamental urban transformation, displacement and planned relocation have become significant features of urban development and planning in cities of the Global South. On the one hand, inner-city beautification and redevelopment, slum clearance and top-down “upgrading”, infrastructure construction and modernisation, disaster-prevention, and market-driven evictions have occurred somewhat simultaneously, all of them requiring poor residents to leave their urban dwellings – at least temporarily. On the other hand, one observes the construction of new cities and dormitory towns and the provision of state-subsidised housing, as well as the development of new infrastructure, sites-and-services schemes, temporary shelters, and high-rise apartment buildings that come to replace informal settlements. All of them mark beginnings, opportunities, and challenges for urban dwellers in a new spatial setting – even if it is in the same location.

Apart from ongoing forced evictions without alternatives (Brickell, Fernández Arrigoitia, and Vasudevan 2017; du Plessis 2005), both actions – the destruction and production of living spaces – are increasingly being linked directly to each other (cf. Meth et al. 2020; Shannon et al. 2018). Incremental in-situ upgrading as well as the renovation of existing urban structures hold little appeal to an aspiring political, business, and urban planning elite that tends to ignore residents’ everyday urban practices and aspirations. Striving for their version of elitist “modernity”, they prefer building and developing from scratch, supporting large-scale rehousing and subsidy schemes that move people within cities (Buckley, Kallergis, and Wainer 2016; Côté-Roy and Moser 2019; Croese, Cirolia, and Graham 2016). As such, the urban lives of many low-income dwellers in rapidly transforming and growing cities are becoming increasingly disrupted, subject to constrained movements, and, hence, shaped by interdependent experiences of both displacement and relocation (cf. Bhan and Shivanand 2013; de Wet 2008; Doshi 2013; Fernández Arrigoitia 2017).

Following this, the aim of this book is to link displacement and planned relocation from an analytical perspective. Focusing on lived experiences, this book will diverge from displacement and relocation as two different and successive parts of the same process. Instead, we suggest analysing displacement, relocation, and reinstallation together through a focus on lived experiences that reveal the inextricability of these processes. These three dimensions contained in the notion of resettlement invite us to adopt a mid- or long-term perspective to the study of urban resettlement, leading us to analyse the production and destruction of urban space as connected, often overlapping, and diverse lived experiences (Figure 1.1). Hence, it allows us to stress post-displacement perspectives still underrepresented in urban studies (Wang 2020). In doing so, the book stresses the term “urban resettlement” by referring to the interwoven processes of displacement, planned relocation, and reinstallation that occur for multiple reasons within metropolitan areas. Notwithstanding the existence of urban resettlement within the Global North, this book is particularly interested in revealing new dynamics of rapid urban transformation in emerging cities in the Global South.

Displacement and Relocation: Two Related Concepts for Understanding Resettlement

The terms “displacement” and “resettlement” have been defined and applied in different ways across disciplines and linguistic contexts. Relatively distinct understandings exist in the context of forced migration studies, where displacement is seen as caused by “armed conflict, situations of generalised violence, violations of human rights, or natural or human-made disasters” (UN 1998, paragraph 2). Internally displaced persons flee for reasons similar to those driving refugees from their countries but do not cross state borders. They are thus forcibly displaced within their own countries. In the same context, resettlement refers to the state-planned relocation of forcibly displaced persons to a place differing from the one in which they temporarily settle. While the use of violence or force is frequent in urban resettlements, too, such strictly conflict-related definitions bound to the nation state seem too narrow to explain intra-urban displacements and resettlements that occur for various reasons in more or less coercive settings, processes, and events, while being related to increasingly market-driven urban policies. This motivates our desire to explore the dynamics of both exclusion and (selective) inclusion produced by displacement and resettlement in the name of urban development.

Figure 1.1 Graphic representation of urban resettlement as a lived experience of both the destruction and production of space.

Source: Authors’ own figure.

Another differentiated understanding of the two terms has emerged alongside large development projects, often dams or mines, that have forced a large number of people to leave their productive land for the “greater good for greater numbers” (Cernea 1997, 1579). So-called “development-caused forced displacement and resettlement” (DFDR) largely occurred within World Bank-funded projects and urged the Bank to develop operational manuals and policy guidelines to limit the negative effects of involuntary resettlement (Cernea and Maldonado 2018). Following the World Bank’s (2001) Operational Policy 4.12 on Involuntary Resettlement, the term displacement is here seen to relate to “all those people who lose land or the right to use land” (World Bank 2004, 5), causing a loss of shelter, assets, or access to assets and income sources, or means of livelihood (World Bank 2001, paragraph 3a). Hence, because of the associated risks of impoverishment for so-called project-affected persons (Cernea 1997; Cernea and Maldonado 2018), the World Bank proclaims that “involuntary resettlement should be avoided where feasible” (World Bank 2001, paragraph 2a). For “unavoidable” DFDR projects led by public authorities and/or private-sector actors, environmental and social standards need to be guaranteed.

However, the Bank’s notion of “resettlement” is twofold, to some extent overlapping with “displacement”, but in any case, going beyond mere physical relocation. First, resettlement “covers all direct economic and social losses resulting from land taking and restriction of access, together with the consequent compensatory and remedial measures” (World Bank 2004, 5, emphasis added). Second, according to the World Bank’s (2015) Resettlement Fact Sheet, “involuntary resettlement refers to two distinct but related processes”, which are “displacement” and – again – “resettlement”. The latter is defined as “the process by which those adversely affected are assisted in their efforts to improve, or at least to restore, their incomes and living standards”. Thus, the English term “resettlement” within DFDR is to a certain extent ambiguous and may refer both to a process of involuntary relocation including displacement (fr: relogement) and the assisted practice of reconstruction after displacement and at a different location (fr: réinstallation or replacement).

Yet, one may distinguish four basic characteristics of a DFDR-based understanding of displacement and resettlement. The first is its rural origin. DFDR literature has emerged in the context of the construction of large dams and other big development projects that have destroyed rural livelihoods and caused the resettlement of a mostly rural population. Hence, a related understanding of resettlement is biased towards the reconstruction of rural livelihoods and poses challenges for its application in urban contexts (Herath, Lakshman, and Ekanayake 2017; Patel, Sliuzas, and Mathur 2015). The second is the strong acknowledgement of multiple risks of impoverishment (Cernea 1997; Cernea and Maldonado 2018), often disregarded by policy makers and private developers in the context of urban resettlement (Koenig 2018...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Positioning “Urban Resettlement” in the Global Urban South
• PART 1: Neoliberal Governance and Spatial Reordering
• PART 2: Experiencing Change Through Notions of Home and Shelter
• PART 3: Long-term Perspectives
• PART 4: Outlook
• Index