 We'll be starting in just a moment. OK, so hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for this week's lecture and planning series presentation. Our opening speaker this spring semester is Karen Jacobson, Henry J. Lair Professor in Global Migration at the Fletcher School of Love and Diplomacy at Tufts University. My name is Maureen Abihanim, and I'm a PhD student here in Columbia's Urban Planning program, and I will be moderating the session. I will start with a few brief logistical announcements and we'll then introduce our speaker. So during the talk, I'd like to remind the audience to please mute their microphone. We will be recording today's session, so anyone in the audience who wishes not to be recorded should turn off their video. The chat box should be used only for discussion regarding the session. If you have any technical questions that apply only to you, please message me or my co-host, Joe Hennickens, privately. And finally, we encourage all of you to type questions into the chat box during the presentation. And after the presentation, we will have time for Q&A, which we'll start the Q&A around 2 or 2.15 so that we have time to go over everyone's questions. I will be coordinating the Q&A with attention to diversity and inclusion. So if you have already had a chance to ask a question, please make room for someone else to ask a question before asking another one. And to ask questions, participants can either use the raise your hand feature and we will call on you to unmute and ask your question directly. Or you may also type your question in the chat box and I can read them out. However, I do know that our speaker today is encouraging a dynamic conversation at the end of our presentation today. So with that, I'm delighted to turn now to introducing today's speaker. Karen Jacobson is the Henry J. Lair Professor in Global Migration and directs the refugees in town project at the Feinstein International Center. Her current research explores urban displacement and global migration with a focus on the livelihoods and financial resilience of migrants and refugees as well as on climate and environment related mobility. Her talk today is based on a forthcoming book that examines the impact of displacement on cities. Professor Jacobson's PhD is in political science at PREMA-MIT and her areas of expertise include refugee and migration issues, humanitarian assistance, urban impact and climate migration. She works closely with UNHCR and other UN agencies as well as international non-governmental organizations. She's a citizen of both South Africa and the U.S. and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts and Western Maine. Today, Professor Jacobson's lecture exploring the impact of displacement on cities, a framework for analysis will discuss her forthcoming book. Many cities of the global south have thousands of displaced people and migrants living in them, either stuck in transit or settled in some way into the city. These migrants have different legal statuses and are often highly mobile both within and between cities of the same country. They sometimes move onwards to other countries or return home, but at any one time cities can hold large actual numbers of refugees or a large proportion of their population. What kind of impact does a large semi-permanent population of displaced people have on cities of the global south? Professor Jacobson proposes a framework for conceptualizing this impact with two important factors in determining urban outcomes. The first is the presence of humanitarian agencies and funding and the second is whether host governments elect to put refugees in caps or not. So with that, Professor Jacobson, if you're ready, I'll pass things over to you now. Great, thank you so much, Maureen. It's a great pleasure to be here with you all today. Thank you for coming. I am very pleased to be able to be talking about my book today, because it's actually the first time I'm talking about it in a public forum and I hope you'll be interested in what I have to say and I'm really curious to hear your questions. So I do encourage you to ask some questions and tell me what you think about this framework. So what I want to do today is begin with just a little bit of information about the scale and scope of urban displacement globally. Then I'm gonna talk about some broad ideas about how displacement to cities affects those cities. So my talk today is not going to be so much about refugees and migrants themselves, but really about what happens to cities. And I'm going to focus on the case of Tripoli, which is Lebanon's second city, which is one of the case studies of my book and the other case study in my book is Cairo, which is obviously a megalopolis. So I'm looking at two very different kinds of cities, but for our purposes today, just look at Tripoli. Then I'm going to kind of explore a little bit why I think that a refugee influx is different from other kinds of migration, the more traditional economic or other kinds of migration that happened into a city and because of these two key factors that Maureen mentioned. And then I'm gonna just end with some additional thoughts about understanding the impact. So I think we may not, unless I just keep start, just continue to talk, which I have been known to do. I think we'll probably finish before too, and in which case I would love to have more of a discussion about what I'm saying, yeah, and to hear your experience too. Okay, so the scope of global displacement. So as of the end of 2019, these numbers are taken from UNHCR, the UN Agency for Refugees, their numbers. And they refer to registered refugees and asylum seekers and internally displaced people. But it's really, really important to understand that this is a subset and probably quite a small subset of the migrants and refugees and displaced people who come into cities. These are only the people who have been registered and are on the radar of UNH, of the UN agencies. So, but they give us an indication. So there are 80 million people displaced in the world, about 30 million refugees, about 4.2 million asylum seekers, people who are seeking formal refugee status, as opposed to the so-called refugees who don't necessarily have status but are called that. And then there are some 46 or so million internally displaced people. That is people who've been displaced for reasons of conflict, violence, persecution, human rights violations, so forth, but have not crossed a border and are displaced within their own country. So that's 80 million people across the globe. They are concentrated in the regions of where they've been displaced. So the most affected region is probably the Middle East, which has seen Syrian displacement, Iraqi displacement, Palestinian displacement, Yemeni displacement, displacement from Iran, and if you extended slightly into Southwest Asia from Afghanistan, which is technically part of Asia, but actually Middle East is called, is part of Asia too. So that region, then the Horn of Africa, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, this is another region with massive displacement. Central, the Great Lakes area, the Congo, Central African Republic, the Wandaan, well, not so much from Wanda anymore, but this is another major region of displacement. And then of course, South Asia, Afghanistan, Myanmar, not so much anymore, but it was at one time Sri Lanka and so forth and still in Pakistan. So these are regions where most of these, this displacement occurs. So what I'm talking about today is the cities that are in these regions for the most part, the cities of the global South, but also the cities that are in bordering the countries that actually displace, where people are displaced. So when we think about where people live, now we tend to think that refugees live in camps, but the fact of the matter is that most refugees do not live in camps. As we can see from these numbers, less than 20% of the world's refugees are in planned camps and collective centers. Most of them, more than half, live in private accommodation that's outside camps in homes they rent or live on people's land. And then there's this rather large number of unknown, it's not known where people live. Again, these numbers are drawn from UNHCR, registered refugees. So UNHCR doesn't actually know where almost a quarter of its refugees live, but we can surmise that a big proportion of battles are probably in urban centers. And similarly with IDPs, if we go down, we see that almost very few IDPs, 4% only are in planned camps. Most live outside camps. I included this column here of self-settled camps because this is an increasing issue that we're seeing globally, of more people are forming their own camps, self-settling into camp-like structures and formations, but those camps are not controlled by the government or by UNHCR. They are managed and formed and governed by the refugees and displaced people themselves. And that number is growing too. And then if we look at where people live, again, we see that most refugees live, well, not most, a third live in urban areas. Now, I actually think this is a much, there is a much larger number live in urban areas because as you recall, some of the numbers that we saw earlier, they don't know where people live. It's unclear where people live. It's very unclear for UNHCR. They register people, but people move around a lot. They may not give out correct or accurate addresses there may not be a proper street address to give in. And so the number, sort of figuring out where people are is difficult, but at least a third and probably more of refugees are in urban areas and almost half of IDPs also have gone into urban areas. So what we're seeing generally, globally, is that people don't live in camps. They live amongst the local or host population and for the most part, they live in urban areas. But again, this is very regionally specific. So in sub-Saharan Africa, more refugees might live in rural areas. For example, Uganda has a very large number of displaced of refugees coming from South Sudan. Those refugees, many of them are in settlements in northern Uganda, which are classified, categorized as rural settlements, even though they may in fact be quite close to cities. Okay, so urban and not in camps is what we're looking at, which means that people come to cities. Okay, so there too, I'm kind of looking at analytically two types of cities. In primary cities are capitals, megalopolis, we see large numbers of refugees, but a relatively small proportion of the population. So Cairo's population, we really don't know what the population carries, but let's say it's around 20 million greater Cairo. It has 250,000 refugees, but that's a very small proportion of the population. But what I think is really important, what I explore in my book a lot is that within these large cities, it's not sufficient to just think about the whole city. It's really important to disaggregate and to break down the city by its neighborhoods or areas. And once we start doing that, we see that there are specific neighborhoods and areas within these cities that are very dominantly populated by refugees. And in those neighborhoods, the impact of refugees on the neighborhood will be much greater than on the city as a whole. So in secondary cities, and often these are border cities, we have us see a much larger proportion of the population comprising refugees. So the example we're going to look at today is Tripoli, Lebanon. This population is about 730,000 people, greater Tripoli, three municipalities. And there are about 18% of that population, it consists of refugees. And we'll talk much more about this case in a minute. But when you look at many secondary cities that are particularly on the borders of countries, you see very large numbers of refugees moving into them and then often becoming stuck in those cities, even though they would like to move further on. So in this population of displaced people living in these cities, in some cases they are in transit, they are in many people are wanting to move through. So for example, Tripoli and Cairo, both of those cities, many people are trying to move on from those cities to go deeper into the country perhaps and probably to leave the country. So from Tripoli, there was a massive movement of Syrians through the port and onto the ferries to Turkey. But the border closed back in 2000, Turkey closed its border, wouldn't allow this movement anymore back in 2015. And so those people have become stuck in Tripoli. And this phenomenon of borders being closed, so people are tracked or stuck in cities is widespread. So some people would think of themselves as being in transit, but other people, especially those who have stayed for a long time start, the idea of being in transit sort of fades and people start seeing the city as being the place where they will stay. And so increasingly we see in many cities around the world that people who originally came as wanting to pass through, on seeing this as a place they will stay at least one hour. And again, I just want to emphasize that these numbers that I'm giving you here are numbers that maybe they're estimates from a census in the case of the population or they're registered refugees in the case of UNHCR's numbers. But these are undercounts for the most part or estimates. We do not have accurate information about this and we can assume that there are more people in most cases, more migrants. Okay, so we have in many cities of the world a large number of a large proportion or even a large number of people who have moved in as I'm calling it a mass influx of displaced people. And the impacts on these cities can be broken down to at least these categories and more. So we see the impacts on markets, on housing markets, on employment markets, on consumer markets, on street markets, on the price of food, on the price of housing, on the price on wages. We see an impact on infrastructure, urban infrastructure. As more people come in, they put much more stress on say for example, garbage removal or on water, so the water supply or on electricity. Then we see a lot more, a lot of the many much stress and much burden put on social services and other services that are offered by the city. So education, school, children, schools, primary schools for children and all children schools are heavily burdened because of the refugee children coming in, health services are very heavily impacted. Another aspect to this is the impact on security and I'll talk more about that in a minute, not just crime, but also in many cities have their own security issues that they're facing anyway and when refugees come in, this can aggravate security problems. There's an impact on the landscape, on the footprint of the city. So in many cases again, the city has expanded, there is more building that is taking place to accommodate this in flux. And so we see the city's footprints being pushed out into surrounding areas. Often these are pushed out into informal settlements but sometimes there is formal building construction that goes on too as a pressure on housing increases. And there are other aspects to urban landscape too that we can discuss a little bit. And then finally, at least for my purposes in looking at how the demography of the city changes, the ethnic divisions of the city may change, ethnic ratios may change, age groups might change as more younger people or children move into the city. Again, it depends, but these are different sectors or different aspects of how a city is impacted. And all of these are going to affect the overall social cohesion in a city, how the peacefulness, the sense of a neighborhood, the way that people think about each other, the security that people feel vis-a-vis each other in a city. It may increase, it may and often does decrease the sense of social cohesion, can define that later. And it will also have some serious environmental impacts whether infrastructure is caving in so it has implications for environment. If informal building and more informal activity takes place around the city that can have implications for the environment, overuse of services can lead to health problems, environmental health problems, public health problems. So these are implications for a city that's heavily affected or as I've said, for a neighborhood in a city that's heavily affected. Okay, so I think it's really important to understand before I go on how to think about this impact. As I've been researching this book, it's really clear to me that it's not enough to just look at what happens after the refugees arrive. Because obviously what was happening in the city before this influx is really determining how the refugees are absorbed or not absorbed and what impact those refugees have. So whether the infrastructure was in reasonable shape or not and often, especially in the cities of the global south, that infrastructure is really not in good shape. It is often extremely decrepit, especially in the areas into which refugees move. One thing that I haven't mentioned but which is really important is that refugees often move into poorer areas. Not all refugees are poor. There are wealthy refugees who have resources, but many of the refugees we think of have lost a lot of their wealth because of being displaced and also because of the journeys they've been on. And so they arrive in a city pretty impoverished, which means their choices are much constrained about where they live. And so that often means that people move into informal settlements or slum areas or very low income areas. And in these areas, infrastructure is no good. Water, sanitation, health services, education, all of these are very in very poor repair in low income areas where people move. So that was already the case before people come when they come, it's aggravating these problems. Another problem that will exist long before any refugees come is weak urban governance. So what we're seeing in many cities of the global South is high levels of corruption, state capture in many cases, including municipality capture where the people who have power in a city are often captured by elites and lack of experience. One of the biggest problems in the cities of the South is that whenever anybody gets in my experience, they get poached or head hunted by private companies, sometimes even by UN agencies. So often the government is kind of undermined by and loses its best people. And so it's not always the case that urban governance is in good shape in these cities. There are security problems. I'll talk about that again later. But then another really crucial piece to all of this is that in many of these cities, and the reason that people come to these cities is because there is an existing population and a long standing population often of migrants and refugees who had been living there before. And the people come to the city because they have a group, a co-national, co-ethnic group of a community there that they can join and who they can expect to help them. And the presence of this population is going to have a big impact on what happens to when people come. If there are no migrants or refugees akin to the new influx, that's gonna make a big difference in a city. It's an empirical question, but I think it's really worth exploring situations, cities where the refugees who have come to them have no community. And there are some. We've seen this in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where many Africans and Middle Easterners came into the Balkans like Serbia and did not have a preexisting community there. And it would be interesting to explore how their situation differed. Anyway, the other thing that I think is really important is that many cities already were strongly linked to the sending countries. And we're gonna see this in the case of Lebanon. Often there's a very interesting area of scholarship that looks at bi-national cities. That is, cities that are on either side of a border that are quite close to each other and that are almost integrated in terms of their economy and their society. And we can reel off any number of cities like this around the world. I mean, there are many. Copenhagen is linked to Swedish, to Danish cities are linked to Swedish cities again just by a bridge. London is linked pretty closely to Calais. In the South, which I'm kind of more interested in here, we're gonna see many cities that have strong linkages to cities across the border. And so this linkage, this bi-national linkage is an important piece of why people come but also how it's gonna play out in the long term. Okay, so this is context, the historical context of the city that I think is really important in trying to figure out what kind of impact the refugees have. So I wanna look now at the case of Lebanon and particularly the case of Tripoli, which is in the North there on the coast. And I'm sure most of you are familiar with the story of Lebanon and what's happened with the Syrian influx but just quick recap. So the war in Syria began in late, well began in 2011 and really amped up at the end of 2011. So the refugees started coming late 2011. By 2017, there were one and a half million Syrians in Lebanon. Now Lebanon's population is 6 million people. So this was close to a quarter of its population that was refugees or people who had come in very suddenly from Lebanon. Of that 1.5 million people, only less than a million were registered with UNHCR. But the government was fair, this is partly because UNHCR stopped registering people in early 2016 but it's well known that Syrians continued to come and government estimated they were this many by 2017. In addition to these Syrians coming across the border, you see that Lebanon has a very long border with Syria. In addition, there were 34,000 Palestinians who had been refugees who'd been living in Syria who came to Lebanon to join Lebanon's already high population of Palestinians. Already present in Lebanon before this influx occurred, there were 278,000 Palestinian refugees. Again, that number is very, very not well determined but let's just assume that's kind of what it is more or less. Those Palestinians have been there for a long time since the 1948, they were also interestingly and people forget this, but they were also almost half a million Syrians living in Lebanon before the refugees came. And this was because Syria had occupied Lebanon during the civil war and had fought in that civil war. And then after the Syrians left Lebanon, many stayed to work and to make a living and stay there, form families and so forth. So there was already a large Syrian population in Lebanon. Plus there were other refugees, there was quite a large number of Iraqi refugees who'd come in the around 2004, five, six round there. So already Lebanon was dealing with migrants and refugees. It was not necessarily a good story and this how the Lebanon had dealt with them as we know, well, we'll talk about that in a second. Okay, but so here was the story in October of 2017, a huge influx of people from Syria, both Syrians and Palestinians and then already a large number of migrants and refugees living in Lebanon. Okay, so let's move to Tripoli. Now here you see, I just showed you this map here because Tripoli is very close to Homs in Syria. It's just a two hour or so car ride to get to Homs. And for any of you who've been to Tripoli, you know, people in Tripoli say talk often about how they would frequently go to Homs. They would go to before the war, they would go there to shop, they would go there to eat cause Syria's course famous for its food and especially Homs is Aleppo. And so people frequently made this trip. Okay, so it was a common for people to go back and forth across the border. And so just that, but okay, but let's just focus on Tripoli for a second. So like I said, this population of less than a million, again, edging around that. Tripoli in the North has had long standing security problems. It is a very different ethnic mix than in the South, much more Sunni. It has a different relationship with Palestinians. Within Tripoli itself, there are neighborhoods that have been in active armed conflict, even as recently, well, just very recently, the Lebanon defense forces have often come into the cities to try to stop these conflicts. There are Alawites who support and the Syrian government. There are other militias who are very much opposed to the government. Both of these groups of Syrians live in Tripoli. And then there are the Palestinians who have their own relationship with Syria. There are Palestinian camps around Tripoli. Some of them have had very serious security problems, have been attacked and shelled and bombed. There's very long and fraught history with Palestinian camps in Tripoli, throughout Lebanon, but especially in Tripoli. So the municipality of Tripoli is weak. In fact, it was dissolved just last year. This is subsequent to when my study takes place, but it has a terrible reputation for corruption and weakness and lack of leadership and lack of capacity. And the city of Tripoli has major infrastructure problems. One of the biggest problems is dealing with garbage, as is the case throughout Lebanon. It has problems with water, it has problems with electricity. This picture you saw earlier is of people pirating from electricity. And so there are the schools, the health services, everything, nothing is working really well there. And Tripoli has major economic problems, very high unemployment. So the city was not in a good shape to receive a large number of refugees. But we do see, so okay, well, so that's Tripoli. Let me just move on now to think about this impact on Tripoli of all these refugees coming, both Palestinians, but especially all the Syrians coming. So what we see in each of these dimensions is big problem. So just for example, to take a couple of these in terms of the housing market in Tripoli, what we saw was Syrians moving into Tripoli across the city, not just in poor areas, but also in middle class areas. As a result, and this is again, a widespread pattern, refugees move into a city, landlords hike the price of housing because they can hike it, there's much more demand as it has increased a lot. And refugees are pretty desperate for housing, so they will pay. And so that means that Lebanese people are often displaced from the housing themselves. They can no longer afford these rents, landlords push them out to take on refugees who they can just give a worse deal to basically, they can make the lease more problematic, they can charge refugees more. And so Lebanese are often displaced. And what we've seen from housing studies in Tripoli is this impact, this knock on impact of Lebanese being displaced and pushed out of certain areas and moving into informal settlements or very low income areas around Tripoli. Similarly with employment, refugees come in, employers often want to employ the refugees because they can pay them less, because refugees are not permitted to work in Lebanon. And so they work under the table informally. And so employers can pay them less. And so they, again, people are displaced or Lebanese are not hired and rather Syrians are hired. So we see impacts on wages and employment markets there. Like I've mentioned already, there were major problems with the infrastructure, with health, with malicious and crime. And even in the case of Tripoli, because of this number of people coming in and the pressure on housing, it really created a boom in the construction industry. And so the edges of Tripoli, the footprint are being pushed out into the hills. And we're seeing a lot of new construction happening, particularly in Bedawi municipality, but elsewhere too. So the city is in pushing out and lodging. I'll say a bit more about informal settlements a little later because that is really an important piece of all of this. Informal settlements and slums in cities get a, not a boost, but get an influx of people, both of locals and of refugees who are moving into these areas because they can afford housing there with all the problems that come with overloading informal settlements. Okay, so now I want to talk to you a little bit about what is different about a refugee influx? Because everything that I've said so far could apply to just migration in general, right? To just immigration, regular immigration happening to the city. But a refugee influx is different in several ways. One, the structure of an influx is different from migrants because it's often the case, not always, but often the case that a large number of people come in a relatively short time. So it's more like a shock to the city. So in the case of Syrians, 1.5 million people came within less than two years. That's a very, that's a shock, right, to a system. As opposed to regular migration, that can be a more of a long-term kind of less intense flow. And what we see again, and this is why I think it's interesting to look at, is when Syrians were displaced across the region, into Jordan, into Iraq, into Turkey, and all of the border cities and the capitals experienced the same kind of phenomenon that we're looking at here. But similarly with other refugee flows, anywhere you look, you know, the Myanmar flow. Refugees from Myanmar came across into Bangladesh. There were camps that were set up, but the Cox's Bazaar is the city, the town that was near the border with Myanmar. And that city was massively affected because most of the, not all of the refugees are living in the camps, they go into the city. So you name it, Venezuelans that are being displaced from Venezuela going into Brazilian border cities. And if you look at what happens to these border cities, it's the same kinds of phenomenon that we see over and over again. So it's a spike in the city's population. It happens very quickly. Yeah, we saw this in Europe too, when Greece's island cities, Mitalini in Lesbos was very suddenly inundated with large numbers of refugees. Okay, so that the structure of the flow is one thing that's very different. But what I want to focus on are these two issues. What happens after the flow is a very important factor for the city. And that is the arrival of the humanitarian industry. So by the humanitarian industry, we mean UN agencies, specifically UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, but other humanitarian agencies too, like UNICEF or, and then there are large NGOs that come in the large international NGOs like the International Rescue Committee or you name it, Mercy Corps, the Jesuit, just about every faith-based organization plus many secular NGOs that come in to help. And so that influx, but that is also an injection of assistance and funds that comes into the city in a short period of time. It's a shock, hopefully a positive shock to the system that happens. But then the second thing that's really important is that the host government's policy toward these refugees is really going to influence the city. So whether the government forms, it decides that they should live in camps or not live in camps is going to be crucial. Now, as we see in the case of Tripoli and Lebanon, the government did not require people to be in camps, did not require Syrians to be in camps, even though it does require Palestinians or it did in the beginning, require Palestinians to be in camps. So just to have a look, I know I'm running out of time now, Maureen. So what happened here? What we saw in terms of the humanitarian impact on Tripoli. There was this mass influx, but when the humanitarians appeared, we suddenly had a shift in what was happening to markets infrastructure and the services, right? So let's look at what exactly what happened. So the Lebanon crisis response plan, this is the latest one, there was an earlier version. Since 2011, Lebanon has received more than $6.7 billion from donor contributions. Okay, this is just in response to the influx. So it's also had a huge influx of aid agencies. UNHCR's operation in 2014 or 13, 14 was one of the biggest in the world. Every NGO, every humanitarian agency and every UN agency, plus also many development agencies were present. They, this support was intended to stem these, the deterioration of living conditions. They supported infrastructure, they supported services. They tried to support local municipalities with capacity building in government. And particularly they brought in cash assistance, which increasingly is the way that humanitarians try to help people is with cash assistance rather than in kind of food assistance. So there was a huge influx of funds and personnel and capacity brought into the country. So that is going, that really impacted these markets. It created the cash infusion had an impact on markets. The infrastructure, there were efforts to build up infrastructure. New hospitals and schools and health centers were created or rehabilitated. That was a big, made a big difference. Or at least tech theoretically, it should have made a big difference. What actually has happened is not so clear. So what about the impact of camps? Now, as I said, in Tripoli, in Lebanon, no camps, but they were Palestinian camps before the refugees came. And in Tripoli, the Bedawi camp is a longstanding camp was established in 1955, longstanding camp there. And so what's happened in Bedawi, which is in the middle of one of the municipalities of Tripoli, it's surrounded by the city, is that many people in the city, Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians have moved into the camp because the camp has, well, I mean, the camp is in very bad shape. It's a very, it's like a slum, but it did have cheaper housing and cheaper consumer goods. And so many people who had been displaced from elsewhere in the city because of these rents being pushed up have moved into Bedawi. But again, humanitarian aid was there to try and push it. So in Unra, one of the UN agencies that takes care of Palestinians was able to use this aid to rehabilitate the health center in Bedawi. But much more importantly, Bedawi camp had a big impact on the security because Bedawi camp is controlled by various factions of Palestinians. But then Fatah and other militias from Syria were also involved in the security. And so the security issues in Bedawi became a much more serious threat to Tripoli over the years. So the presence of a camp nearby has a mitigating effect on the impact, but can also have an aggravated security and other kinds of problems at the same time. So here you see a picture of the Lebanese army had tried to control what was going on in the camp, the Palestinian factions within the camp, including Fatah, where people died. I mean, there was some armed conflict that was happening, this was just recently. And so these are serious problems that a camps can create in some cases, but at the same time, the camps can ease off some of the problems. It becomes extremely complicated, really worse kind of figuring out how to go. So where does all this take us? This situation, this case study of Tripoli is, I've dived into it in quite a lot of detail, but if we look at these patterns of impact, like I said, these are widespread in cities of the global south that are close to areas of conflict, that are spilling people out, but they're not only in the south. So for example, we see, well, I mean, here's a case of where urban camps are widespread. This is the case of Chamlo Camp in Damascus, a bond where the city was, the area was completely bombed and shelled, and yet people continue to come for food aid. So urban camps are a widespread problem. But also we should note that displacement from and within cities is not specific to the south. Here's a case of Japan, these people were displaced from one city and went to other cities. So similar kinds of dynamics are in place in the north. So it's, I think a really important, to me, an understudied issue. I have been in this field of refugees studies and forced migration for 30 years, and I am struggling to find really good scholarship and material on many of these issues of the way in which cities are impacted. There's quite a bit of theoretical stuff, but the empirical work on what is actually happening in cities, that is, I'm struggling to find good stuff on that. So let me just conclude with a couple of things. One is, I think in looking at this issue of the impact of displacement on cities, it's really important to look at informality, the informal sector, whether it's informal housing, informal financial services, this is a really important issue that links cities, whether it's informal employment, the informal sector in general is huge, because this is where most of the displaced people and migrants are going into. Second, I think it really important to look at the linkages between the city and how it's located within the region, whether there are other big cities that influence it, but also the diaspora. So one place I've just been studying a little bit in the last few weeks is Eritrea, and the issue of Eritrea, you see a lot of migrants and refugees leaving Eritrea, but there is also a massive diaspora who's feeding money back into Eritrea, and with implications by Asmara for the capital in Eritrea. So these are just two of the things that I think are, I mean, there are many others, but I could talk literally for Al and I'm going to stop now. Thank you so much for listening already. Thank you so much. Love to stop, but I'd love to hear any of your thoughts. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Professor Jacobson, for your inspiring talk, and we will open it now for questions. Just as a reminder, to ask questions, participants are encouraged to use the raise your hand teacher, and I will call on you to unmute, or you can ask your question, or you can also type your question in the chat box and we can read them out. Don't be shy, people. I'm sure you have things that you disagree with or your own information or own knowledge of cities. Love to hear from you just to share your thoughts. Yes, Joe, I see. I just had a question about the linkages issue, which you sort of returned to at the end. I was wondering if there's work on, I mean, you go through sort of these factors that drive refugees to go to certain places, and I was wondering if there's any work on how individuals actually make those decisions and whether the decisions are made consciously about choosing, say, Cairo instead of Istanbul or whatever, or whether it's just that these factors are sort of driving people in a certain direction, but it's sort of unconscious. No, I think, Joe, it's a really important issue, is why do people go where they go, right? And if there's one thing that is really quite well researched is the importance of networks. It seems to me that is the number one driver in deciding where people go, and sometimes also why they go, right? So if you are stuck in Syria or Asmara or Eritrea or in South Sudan somewhere or wherever it is, Venezuela somewhere, and you realize you have to leave. It's time to go. Either you're being directly persecuted or your family is starving, you can't support them anymore, where are you gonna go? You're gonna go to the place where you know people. It just makes the most sense. Either you have someone there, or if you don't have an actual relative there, you know some people like from your village or your town or someone makes you a connection or introduction, that is the thing that is driving people and there is very good research on this. There is, I think not every other factor is very, comes only a very distant second to that. Yes, there are attractions like jobs and there are attractions perhaps like resettlement and there are other kinds of things. But if you're about to leave and you're needing to go, you go where you know someone. I mean, it would be the same for all of us. If we had to leave and go somewhere quickly, we would look for the place where we know someone and we'd go there. And that is why these cities, the bigger a city is, the more it has more people to attract more. And so it's a growing problem, a growing issue. So yeah, it's a good thing. And the decision to migrate, a really interesting question, a really, really interesting theoretical and empirical question. It has good research, but there's not enough on refugees decision to migrate. Because that is also an issue that needs, that is not straightforward, so. I think Christian Jepsen had a question. Hi there, Christian. Hey. So on the note of the short-term disasters like the tsunami that you raised towards the end of the presentation, I guess what my question is, how did the Beirut explosion last year impact refugee movement and like IDPs in Lebanon? And I guess it's sort of like a more macro second bit. How does short-term disasters like that impact the situation of people who'd been displaced? Yeah, I think it's a good question. And I don't know. I can see that in general, when that happens a couple of things happen. And it did with Beirut too. After those terrible explosions, there wasn't an injection of funds and disaster assistance and support and media attention, all of that. So that can help immediately afterwards. And then after the longer term, what has happened? Because that's when you're gonna see the real ripple effects, the knock-on effects of disasters like that. In general, when we see political disasters happen, like, for example, the uprising, the Tahrir Square uprising, the Egyptian revolution in 2011, that is not good for refugees. When we have political conflict and political revolution, political problems like that, refugees are often struggling. And one of the things that we saw after that was people really pulling back into their houses and not going out into the street for refugees and not going out onto the street for many weeks afterwards as they just hunkered down. So we see a hunkering down over refugees as when these disasters happen. But it's, again, we need more empirical work on what happens to people who are displaced. And of course, the COVID situation is a perfect example of that. Because what has happened to refugees after COVID is we're beginning to see some quite interesting findings as a result of that. But of course, the problem with COVID is one of the problems with COVID is we have very, our information has suddenly just gone down so sharply because we don't have eyes now. We don't have journalists out there. We don't have researchers out there. We don't really know what's going on since COVID. So we've got sort of a little information gap going on. Nice to see you, Christian, my student. I think Renjani also had a question. Yeah, I was wondering, I mean, you spoke about the burden of refugees on already strained services in the global south in cities and how that sort of impacts policies towards refugees as well as perhaps their acceptance among the local population. I was wondering whether there are similar studies done on the impact of refugees on countries like Germany, countries which have better services, but also local reactions to them, yeah. Yeah, it's good. Renjani, I must say that if there's one area that has been really well researched, it's Europe and how Europe has had to deal with the increase in migration that happened after 2015. And so there is really a lot of research and scholarship on that. Even on individual cities in Europe and across the board, Germany for sure, are really a lot of scholarship, UK, Denmark, Italy, you name it, there's plenty of that. So yeah, what there's not plenty of is much more research on the global south, however you want to define that. That is where we're really not seeing, given how much migration happens in the south, we're not seeing enough research there. So I encourage you all to do that, to do research. I think we're good. Sorry, Dan Draps, I think Koryu is next. Hi, my name is Julio, I'm a student at Princeton, but thanks for the lecture, Dr. Jacobsen, it's really good to hear this. One of the questions that I had was, is there any information on the labor markets and how the migrants affect the labor pool there? And specifically, since we're at architecture school here, I'm wondering how the migrants also rebuild parts of the city if you actually trace their labor. Yeah, it's a huge, huge issue because of course we have people coming in, bringing everything, bringing their skills, bringing their entrepreneurial abilities. Even if they're not skilled, bringing their labor, we have women, the whole issue of gender I haven't even, we haven't even talked about, but of course women, and so it's a huge and a super, super important problem. It's the kind of issue that has been much more looked at by, but in sort of buried. So economists look at these kinds of issues, but you don't see them disaggregating migrants from the broader urban labor force. And to me, this is crucial because migrants are, because they're so often are in the informal, informally paid because they're under the table or they are affecting wages, they're affecting labor conditions, but so that's the wage, waged labor, waged employment, non-waged employment, including businesses and so forth, self-employment. That is, you know, in my case on Cairo, I'm looking particularly at this one area in Cairo called Sixth October City, which is one of the satellite cities of Cairo, about 25 kilometers outside Cairo. The Syrians have taken over district six of one area of October, of the city and have transformed that city, transformed that area. Economically, they've brought in their own businesses. I mean, you walk through this area and you think you're in Syria and many cities are like this. Even in Egypt, in Cairo, even the Egyptians call their own shops, shops, they call them after Syria because they want people to think they're Syrians so that people come to their, I mean, it's phenomenal how this economic shift has happened. It's huge and you know, but that is a relatively better studied issue. Of course, it doesn't mean that everyone thinks is thrilled with having the Syrians there by any means. They recognize that they're good business people, that they're good workers, that they have skills, but that doesn't mean that they're, although it's very complex, but it's a really important issue and I encourage you to do a study on it. Thanks. I think next we have Mariana. Hi, again, thank you for your lecture. I've learned a lot. I'm from a border city with the U.S. and Mexico, and I... Which city? Can you tell us? Matamoros, which is bordering with Brownsville, Texas. And several cities in the border with the U.S. have had a large influx of refugees and asylum seekers that are mostly going to the U.S. But then I guess my question is more because all of the patterns that you've mentioned in the lecture also applies to the cities as well. But then I did a small research last semester that kind of opened my eyes on the lack of media attention that the Mexican side of the border has had on the refugees and the asylum seekers. So I wanted your opinion on, or your take on how much it impacts the governance and the resources that cities get allocated after the media kind of highlights some of these areas. Yeah, Mariana, you really hit it. You have hit it on the nail on the head. If every city could have a nice big fat investigative story that kind of blew up into the front page about the impact on the city, it would make a big difference. The media have a huge role to play in this. And like you say, it just doesn't happen for the most part. I mean, international media and local media, yes. So yeah, that could make a big difference to, but of course most people aren't really interested in my own, I just find most people, unless you're from an area like you are, you're not really interested in, it's hard to get Westerners to really kind of look or be interested in what's happening in outside their own countries or their own spheres of influence. But the media have a big role to play in this. And yeah, it would be really good to have more of it. If I could just make a real quick plug, since all of you are, I see many people here who may be from other countries. And if I could just make a quick plug for my Refugees in Towns project, we are specifically trying to focus on the experience of individual towns that have had a refugee or a migrant or an IDP or a returning or a deportee or whatever influx into your town. And if you are from a town like that and we are really interested in talking to you about writing the experience up of your town, and we often try to partner refugees or displace people in the town with their researcher to write up a study for us. And if you go to our website, refugeesintowns.org, we have already 40 or so cases of different towns around the world, including Mexico border. We have Tijuana and we have Monterrey. And we're really looking for more cases and more reports. And please be in touch with me if you have any interest in this or look at it. Because I think we need more information, more grassroots sort of from the ground up and written by local people of what's happening in these cities. So that's just my little plug, if you don't mind. Thank you, Professor. I added the link to your website in the chat box. Great. I'm wondering if Katja had a question. Sure, yes. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Jakobsen for this really interesting lecture. So policymakers and donors seem to be really interested in the causes for this placement. But I do wonder if it is worth differentiating between the causes of these placements such as conflict, disaster, or especially climate. Because I don't know if these different causes have a different impact on cities. I imagine that for cities, it's more important to differentiate between, I guess, long-term and short-term displacement. But what are your thoughts? Yeah, I'm particularly interested in looking at displacement as opposed to migration. And I really distinguish between those two. Migration being a much slower, more managed process that happens over a longer period of time. Whereas displacement happens when people have to come fairly quickly. So that can happen for all kinds of reasons. It can happen because of conflict. It can happen because of a disaster, like an earthquake or something like that. And it can happen because of climate-related migration, but that tends to not be an immediate sort of disaster. It's not like a, I mean, it is a disaster, of course, but climate-related migration takes place over a longer period. It's a more sort of managed process. So I'm particularly interested in the displacement that happens really sharply and quickly. And that has all kinds of, like people have been talking about it, it has a media, the media kind of jump on it. And then the donors jump on it. And then the development agencies. And so all of this happens, whereas with a longer sort of more managed, more drawn out period of migration, there's no media, there's no, none of that happens. So there's a big difference, like you say, the causes are really important. And it's somewhat easier just to focus on the dramatic disaster and dramatic scenes of cities being inundated and so forth. So that's where the impact happens from outside, yeah. So I just want to be mindful of time. We have about 10 minutes left. Caitlin will be the last person to ask a question in person. Then we have a few questions that were typed in the chat box so we can move to those. I'll go ahead, Caitlin. Thanks. So yeah, I just had a quick question. Of course, it was not really news. The numbers in terms of how the numbers are quite skewed and we don't fully aware of the big picture. I guess my question is, and I don't know if I'm allowed to ask this question, but does it serve the UN and the UNHCR to not keep track of these numbers? Because once they have these numbers, they are then responsible for these bodies, correct? So is it like, does it almost help their cause not to have these direct numbers? And then kind of second part of the question, what is lacking? Is it a lack of data? Is a lack of like data analysts? Is a lack of research? Yeah, okay, okay. Caitlin, that's a very cynical approach. It's fine. I mean, it works both ways, right? If you're undercounting that can serve you, if you're overcounting it can serve you. And numbers are just hugely political, right? I mean, there's been interesting stuff written about the politicization of counting people, right? Of counting whether it's population in the census or whether it's counting the number of refugees. Governments have an incentive to inflate the number of refugees, because then it means more funds. UN might like you say might have an interest in inflating it, but then that cuts both ways because then it proves that they're not doing a good job if there are more people and so forth. So I think that I would say that the, you know there's always a background story in the case of Lebanon. The government wanted to stop registering refugees in part because it was afraid that Lebanon citizens were going to just freak when they started realizing how many, I mean, I'm being very simplistic and facetious here but when they started realizing how many Syrians were coming, they wanted to stop counting, have an official count of them. That is a slightly unusual situation because most countries don't, you know the government, the UNHCR is usually encourages governments to keep registering and they do but it is sort of, it is difficult to keep track of a very dynamic population like this. You know, you can't follow people if they move away, if they change a dress, if they give this SIM card and there's a big market for SIM cards, you know people sell SIM cards. And so that's the only way that you contract people. It's, I wouldn't blame them entirely but it's definitely an issue about that we really don't have really much of a sense orders of magnitude at best, but we don't have you know, when you see 5,695,247 people that is nonsense. You might as well just cut off the last three digits completely because you don't have any sense of that kind of accuracy. That may have been, you know, on day X that there was that many there but three days later, half of them could have, you know just so yeah, I think it's really a big issue and we have to be very skeptical but really try to understand what these issues are just like you've done. All right, thank you. I think that was really interesting to frame like the politicization of the counting. I never thought about it. And it's good stuff written on that. Jeff Crisp has written a nice piece on that a few years ago. Yeah. Thank you. So we have a question from our PhD colleague Stefan Norgaard who asks, you mentioned some of the challenges for the lower income working class Lebanese populations because of incoming refugees willing to work for less than wages or perhaps except more precarious or unaffordable housing. Are you considering that this may foster or has fostered ethno nationalism or other politics of resentment? However, you may define that. Definitely. Definitely. You know, it was the case as this is many, many places that initially people are welcome, refugees are welcomed by locals who are sympathetic toward them, who want to help them, who offer them their homes, who offer them help and assistance. There's a lot of goodwill toward refugees, especially when they're your neighbors who you've known them for years. But then as over time as people stay longer and start taking your jobs, start taking and start, you know, all of these other problems happen, it's inevitable that people's goodwill kind of dies away. And so we see this happening just everywhere. It's just one of those established shifts and trends that happen everywhere. And but what we don't see is enough attention paid to poor locals who are suffering the brunt of this. They are the ones who are displaced from housing, who lose their jobs and so forth. And so what we have seen in Lebanon is that the cash assistance that was provided to refugees, there has also been cash assistance that was provided to poor Lebanese on the part of in a world food program and others. So that was a good thing that's happened. Because one of the worst things that happened is when resources are only given to refugees in a city in a carbon setting where people are living next to each other. And that's where you really see tension and tensions arise when refugees are getting funds and support, but their neighbors who are just as poor are not getting anything. That is the worst situation. And increasingly we've seen that the UN has recognized this and is trying to address this problem. Another question from Yashree Venkatesan. I had a question about informal services. Are there differences between countries where the host government policies are friendlier towards refugees and those where the attitudes are less friendly? And if so, what are the lessons we can learn from these differences? So there's the government's position, right? The government's policy toward refugees. You stay in a camp or you're not allowed to work or you're not allowed to use our social services or you cannot put your children in our school. These are all issues that different governments have taken different positions on, right? And it depends on your status. If you're an asylum seeker, you can do something. It even depends on your nationality. For example, in Kenya, if you're a Somali or Sudanese, you have to live in the camps. The Somali camps on the Eastern border, the Northwestern camp Kakuma if you're Sudanese. If you are from the Congo or elsewhere, a DRC or elsewhere in Africa or from other countries, you don't have to stay in camps. So the policy toward different refugee nationalities can be different. And it can be different if it depends on your legal status, if you've applied for asylum, if you haven't applied for asylum, if you... So it really varies, but that's just the government. You asked about informal services. One thing I've not mentioned here, because I didn't have time because I'm trying to cram too much in, but one thing that's really important to know is that refugees themselves have a lot of agency and a lot of entrepreneurial energy and they not only work and provide for themselves, but they also provide services. And so when you look at Tripoli, one of the people, characters that I'm following in my book is a Syrian refugee who started three schools for Syrian refugees that he started himself by regenerating his own funds and fundraising. He created and began these schools. And what's amazing is he's now getting a lot of requests from Lebanese people to have their children go to those schools because those schools are better than the Lebanese schools. So we're seeing that the refugees themselves can step up and create and provide these services for their own people sometimes and sometimes even further beyond their own people. So how people react in these, it's not just about the government, it's very much about also what refugees themselves do to look after each other, create community. You're on mute Maureen. Oh, I think we have one more minute. I do want Yulim Lee to ask her question or read it out if that's okay. I know we may be going over time but I think she's based in the UK so I'd really love to include. I see on the website that the main research does not include the Southeast Asia which is also part in the concept of the global South. I'm not sure what website you mean but I'm guessing the refugees in town which I shared. You also mentioned Japanese cases in your presentation. I wonder how you consider the differences between refugees in Southeast Asia and the rest of the global South? Oh no, the only reason we don't have Southeast Asia on our side is because we just haven't found someone there yet to do a study. This is just a couple years old. I mean, there's no difference. The refugees in Southeast Asia have the same problems, the impacts on cities in Southeast Asia are the same. If you look at Thailand as a major receiving country, the same issues are in play in Thailand. It has border cities, may sought that is affected by Burmese refugees and it has Bangkok, the capital that is differently affected. Whether you go to Indonesia or the Philippines or whether you go, you name it, all of these dynamics are similarly in play in Southeast Asia. My refugees in town side is a project or long standing project that I have. It's not really related to this that I'm talking about today, which is my book. So, but yeah, if you're interested in doing a study in somewhere in Southeast Asia, please be in touch with us because we'd love to have more of that. Thank you Professor Jacobson. Thank you Maureen for asking this for me. You're welcome. Thank you so much Professor Jacobson on behalf of GSAP and the Urban Planning Program in particular, I'd love to thank you again for presenting today. We really appreciated you taking the time. This is I guess one of the benefits of having, you know, education migrate to Zoom. And I look forward to keeping in touch and reading your book actually when it comes out. Yeah, let's hope it comes out. Thank you so much everybody. Wonderful questions and really great audience. Thank you very much Maureen and everyone at Lips. Okay, bye-bye. Bye everyone. Bye.