Carpi, E; Boano, C; (2018) Border towns: humanitarian assistance in peri-urban areas. Humanitarian Exchange , 71 pp. 39-42.

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Abstract

Over the last decade, NGO practitioners, policy-makers and scholars have been encouraging humanitarian agencies to recognise the importance of including local authorities and integrating urban infrastructure into humanitarian programming when intervening in crisis-affected settings. Donor investments and scholarly literature have focused on enhancing what we know about responses to urban crises. With the increasing focus on urban areas, the humanitarian sector must develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding and analysis of the urban context: its infrastructure, services and systems, segregation and fragmentation, informal and community-based networks and the broader relationship between transient humanitarian actors and the population at large. This article looks at some of the consequences of the increasing urbanisation of humanitarian response, with a focus on border regions neighbouring Syria. Towns in these areas retain a rural character despite rapid growth, accelerated by the arrival of large numbers of refugees, and rural livelihoods are still at the centre of their economies. We argue that humanitarians should not approach areas such as these in the same way as they might much larger cities. These settings cannot be fully categorised as ‘urban’, but nor are they rural; rather, they are undergoing a complex spatial transition along a continuum between the two. Humanitarian actors must take this into account when designing interventions.

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