DPU staff produce outputs as part of the Urban Crises Learning Partnership

As part of the Urban Crises Learning Partnership, we are proud to announce a series of outputs addressing the need for preparing and responding to crises in urban areas. In alignment with the current debate about rethinking humanitarian practice, together with a critique of humanitarian urbanism, the two-year initiative (in partnership with Oxfam, the ODI and UCL) includes, among others, a report by the DPU’s Camillo Boano and Ricardo Martén, Think Urban and Learn from the City: Exploring Urban Dimensions of Humanitarianism; and a piece titled ‘Learning from Crisis’ Humanitarian Formula: Bridging Disaster and Normality’, written by DPU alumni Estella Carpi. The document challenges us to articulate what we mean by ‘learning’, while examining the conditions necessary for change if learning is to take place from crises. The series includes several other reports that reflect on the learning experience of the partners in Haiti and Bangladesh.

All the different resources are available at https://www.habitatforhumanity.org.uk/what-we-do/disaster-response/uclp/ The reports encourage humanitarian agencies to recognise the importance of including local authorities and integrating urban infrastructure into their programmes when intervening in crisis-affected settings, and 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. The UCLP project was part of a wider initiative funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) called the Urban Crises Learning Fund and was managed by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). More contributions will be added in the coming weeks.