Instead, we should listen to the voices of urban citizens, which include the forcibly displaced, and ask them how they interpret their environments and how they want to organize themselves around the spaces they live in.Ĭoming back from a 6-week mission in Bidi Bidi, our Emergency Lab says that in the recently established Bidi Bidi settlement in Northern Uganda, the different zones of the settlement have completely different personalities. In the future, as cities continue to grow organically as places where people from all walks of life mix, categories will be more difficult to hold on to for long periods of time, and staying ahead of the curve will be difficult.

One way of moving forward would be to re-think how we categorize cities and the forcibly displaced populations living in them. Naomi Hanakata, an architect, urban designer, and urban sociologist based in Singapore. They not only fail to describe reality in many cases but are also misleading our perception of it,” says Dr. “We have to redefine established and widely used concepts such as ‘slum’, ‘suburbanization’, or even ‘gentrification’ as these concepts no longer adequately describe highly complex and specific processes which have developed along with the rapid speed of urbanization taking place in the past decades. What can we learn from this expansion and these blurred lines, and how can governments, whether local or national, ensure that cities remain a platform for continued sustainability, humanity, and imagination for all? Urbanization comes with various forms of expansion, and lines between formal neighborhoods and self-established informal settlements, such as Kibera in Nairobi or refugee settlements, such as Nakivale in Uganda, are becoming increasingly blurry. More refugees and IDPs are moving into urban areas to avoid camp settings that may lack opportunities, such as employment and access to services.Īs cities change and constantly morph along with people’s needs and demands, they find it more difficult to deliver services to their citizens in scale and on time, which calls for even more innovative solutions. Displaced populations are also part of this trend of increasing urbanization, as 60% and 80% of all refugees and IDPs – respectively – live in urban areas. So, as existing cities grow bigger and new cities are formed, sustainable urbanization is key for a healthy planet. Cities are both the culprits and the source of innovative solutions to megatrends such as climate change. Currently, over half of the global population live in cities and it is estimated that this percentage will rise to 70% by 2050. We live in an increasingly urban world which is shaping our environments and our future.

How can innovation affect ways of life