Urbanization and Resilience

This research sought to investigate the impact of conflict on various elements of the food system in Sudan to identify those with the biggest influence on food and nutrition security amongst people experiencing extreme poverty. This research systematically maps components of local and national food systems; identifies specific pressure points where conflict interacts with them; and proposes operational, policy and research actions tailored to supporting and strengthening food systems disrupted and transformed by conflict in Sudan.

This research sought to investigate the impact of conflict on various elements of the food system in Somalia to identify those with the biggest influence on food and nutrition security amongst people experiencing extreme poverty. This research systematically maps components of local and national food systems; identifies specific pressure points where conflict interacts with them; and propos operational, policy and research actions tailored to supporting and strengthening food systems disrupted and transformed by conflict in Somalia.

This research sought to investigate the impact of conflict on various elements of the food system in Haiti to identify those with the biggest influence on food and nutrition security amongst people experiencing extreme poverty. This research systematically maps components of local and national food systems; identifies specific pressure points where conflict interacts with them; and proposes operational, policy and research actions tailored to supporting and strengthening food systems disrupted and transformed by conflict in Haiti.

This research sought to investigate the impact of conflict on various elements of the food system to identify those with the biggest influence on food and nutrition security amongst people experiencing extreme poverty. Drawing on evidence from Somalia, Haiti and Sudan, this cross-country research systematically mapped components of local, national and international food systems; identified specific pressure points where conflict interacts with them; and proposed operational, policy and research actions tailored to supporting and strengthening food systems disrupted and transformed by conflict.

The research finds that across all three country contexts, conflict has a negative impact on the food system in ways that are Connected - complex interconnections between different nodes in the food system; Cumulative - successive, repeated exposure to specific distortions and disruptions in the food system that intensify impacts; and Compounding - combined impacts of co-occurring effects on the food system that act together to multiply impacts.

This paper describes the current rates of urbanization and the developing health consequences framed as a humanitarian crisis. The authors go on to analyze the current state of knowledge and policy on urban health. They lay out the priorities for future research and work and the role for academics, governments and international agencies to prevent the impending deterioration in global health due to rapid urbanization.

This study evaluated the health impact of a public private partnership using microfinance to upgrade slum infrastructure in Ahmedabad, India. The authors show a statistically significant reduction in waterborne illness as a result of the intervention and point to further unmeasured benefits from the upgrade. This is an example of the data driven projects HHI is conducting to lend evidence with operational research on interventions.

Reference: Soc Sci Med. 2010 Sep;71(5):935-40.

As rapid urbanization creates complex environments that concentrate the risks and hazards of man-made and natural disasters, it also presents a vital advantage that must be exploited. Urban humanitarian emergencies by their very nature occur within the geo-political sphere of a governing body, the municipal government, and as such they are the responsibility of that body. It is the duty of the municipal governments to prevent and prepare for and respoond to humanitarian emergencies that may affect their citizens. Preparedness at the city level, therefore, remains a valuable area for development to mitigate the effects of humanitarian crises. Rapid urbanization now allows a greater proportion of the population to fall under a responsible municipal government and an opportunity to promote and advance urban planning around preparedness.

This brief report reviews the health concerns that arise with rapid urbanization and confront humanitarian organizations during acute emergencies.  The authors argue that one way forward is for humanitarian organizations to learn from existing grass-roots efforts.

Rapid urbanization represents the most significant demographic change of the twenty-first century. 2008 marked the first time in human history that over half of the world population lived in urban settings. The process of urbanization, fueled by economic and social foreces, has particularly accelerated in countries in the Global South. By the year 2050, it is predicted that 70% of the world's population will live in urban settings. 

This study seeks to offer a practical examination of resilience in complex urban landscapes for the academic community and humanitarian actors at the local and international levels. Distrito de Aguablanca (Cali, Colombia), a complex settlement area with some 600,000 residents, functions as a case study in human security and resilience that can inform public policy and community level decision making in especially difficult humanitarian environments, with sociopolitical volatility, large populations of internally displaced persons, and high crime and violence rates.

This paper introduces a preliminary analytical framework that re-conceptualizes fragility and resilience at the city level. It aligns the two concepts across a range of political, social, economic and environmental factors enabling comparison across thousands of cities globally based on existing data. The framework was then partially applied to map out fragility in over 2,100 cities. It finds that roughly 14 percent of the sample score in the highly fragile range. Another 66 percent report average levels of fragility while 16 percent report low fragility.4 Of course, fragility and resilience are both dynamic and change over time. The paper finds that all cities are fragile to some degree, though intensity varies in relation to the aggregation of risk.

Individuals and organizations responding to humanitarian crises recognize the need to improve urban emergency response and preparedness – including the need to devise better methods for assessing vulnerability within urban populations. 

This systematic review represents the first ever attempt to systematically search, sort and synthesize the existing evidence in order to consolidate findings on the tools, methods and metrics used to identify and prioritize vulnerable people, households and communities, including those displaced within and to urban areas. It is accompanied by a stand-alone executive summary and evidence brief. It forms part of a series of humanitarian evidence syntheses and systematic reviews commissioned by the Humanitarian Evidence Programme. 

Introduction: Urbanization has challenged many humanitarian practices given the complexity of cities. Urban humanitarian crises have similarly made identifying vulnerable populations difficult. As humanitarians respond to cities with chronic deficiencies in basic needs stressed by a crisis, identifying and prioritizing the most in need populations with finite resources is critical.

Methods: The full systematic review applied standard systematic review methodology that was described in detail, peer-reviewed, and published before the research was conducted.

Results: While the science of humanitarian practice is still developing, a systematic review of targeting vulnerable populations in urban humanitarian crises shed some light on the evidence base to guide policy and practice. This systematic review, referenced and available online, led to further findings that did not meet the pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria for evidence set out in the full review but that the authors, in their expert opinion, believe provide valuable insight nonetheless given their recurrence.

This background note is part of the United Nations University project on Resilience and the Fragile City and is meant to complement the paper ‘Conceptualizing City Fragility and Resilience’ (de Boer, Muggah, Patel 2016) which formally presents the fragile and resilient cities assessment framework. As resilience has become a more prominent and pervasive concept, this paper explores its application for urban environments in contexts of fragility (i.e. urban zones characterized by complex crises that often involve high levels of violence, extreme poverty, and disaster simultaneously) (see de Boer 2015). The paper reviews dozens of resilience frameworks and highlights a number of important findings: 1) the majority of existing resilience frameworks are useful for assessing resilience to natural disasters, yet few are effective in understanding resilience in contexts of fragility; and (2) many existing frameworks have yet to be empirically tested and largely rest on a Theory of Change. This means that very few indicators have been independently derived based on empirical data of what works. To fill these gaps, the paper concludes by proposing an approach to assessing resilience in contexts of urban fragility, which is then fully developed in the framework paper mentioned above.

Multiple recent global agendas have advanced the case for resilience to underpin humanitarian action and disaster risk reduction. These agendas have been incorporated into multiple efforts but evidence to guide action has lagged behind. This study examines a specific link, often cited through qualitative research, between social cohesion and community resilience in two urban slums of Port au Prince, Haiti. Scales to measure social cohesion and resilience are applied to these communities to develop a quantitative measure of these two characteristics. These two characteristics are then analyzed with various other demographic variables of community members to quantitatively explore associations among them. The results show that a higher social cohesion score is statistically associated with a higher resilience score and among the variables tested, social cohesion had the greatest impact on the community resilience as measured by these scales. and shows a statistical association between the two. The findings add to the growing but nascent literature on empirical evidence for resilience characteristics. Further examinations are drawn out of the findings and future investigations should tackle the inductively derived characteristics of resilience to further guide programs and policy.