Tales of the city

12 May 2015

You don't need me to repeat the statistic (because everybody knows it) but I'm going to anyway: more than half the world's population now lives in urban areas. Behind that simple figure are a host of other complicating factors – for example, the absolute number of slum dwellers is growing, but relative numbers are falling. The basic message is loud and clear however: the future is urban.

Although the message might be clear, the humanitarian community doesn't always have a clear idea about how to respond; as ALNAP's own Urban Humanitarian Response Portal says, “urban disasters differ in important ways from rural disasters, and force the humanitarian community to rethink fundamental tools, approaches and assumptions.” Many organisations are not clear about what those differences are, though, and the community is struggling to work out what “rethink” means.

Needs assessment is a good example of the challenge we face, and ACAPS' new technical brief on urban needs assessment aims to provide a starting point for the “rethinking” process. Existing assessment tools developed for rural contexts in which aid work has historically taken place – famines and floods in farming communities, refugee camps and IDP centres in marginalised areas – are not always well-suited to urban environments.

Sana'a market stall

Many assessment tools rest on assumptions about the context and content of lives and livelihoods that do not necessarily apply in the city. The distinction between rural and urban, as experienced by individuals, is not a “divide” but a continuum defined by a series of characteristics. Some are fairly obvious – urbanisation implies more density and more diversity, for example, both of which can be incorporated into survey methodology – but it is less clear how we respond to other characteristics.

Take verticality; unlike smaller settlements, cities extend above and below ground level in the form of multi-storey buildings, transit routes, and utility networks (such as water and sanitation services). These present specific humanitarian risks that our staff may not be able to assess – such as structural integrity of tower blocks – and also confound any survey methodology that relies on area-based sampling. Thinking vertically requires new thinking, but there are few resources to help staff with this process.

Some organisations are ahead of the game in terms of building conceptual frameworks – such as Action Against Hunger – or publishing concrete analysis – such as the REACH Initiative. Drawing on the experience of these and other organisations, ACAPS has published a technical brief on urban needs assessment to complement (rather than replace) existing guidance. The brief describes key characteristics, using simple real-life examples to illustrate those characteristics, and applies them to the assessment cycle.

The brief also identifies areas where more work is required: markets, for example, are an aspect of urban life that that humanitarian organisations are not especially familiar with, but that are critically important in the lives of urban residents. Realising how markets provide infrastructure for livelihoods leads us to the fundamental challenge of urban assessment, which has nothing to do with data collection: the challenge of defining and identifying urban vulnerability.

This challenge has a number of aspects. Urban diversity may cover up inequalities and obscure the fact that poverty may be bad or worse than in rural areas; patterns, such as the distribution of displaced communities, may be as important as absolute numbers. Traditional categories of vulnerability (such as the elderly, the sick, and women and children) are often unable to capture the interlinked nature of urban life, and may miss some groups completely. Finally, it can be difficult to disentangle humanitarian needs related to crisis from those related to chronic poverty, particularly in informal settlements.

Research in this area, by ACAPS and others, exposes the assumption that the humanitarian community is best equipped to respond to urban crises. There are a range of organisations with a better understanding of these issues, not least of which are the local organisations and authorities in towns and cities. Assessment can no longer be carried out by humanitarian organisations on their own; the success of needs assessment in urban areas requires a more inclusive and more flexible assessment practice that relies on joint capabilities. As anybody can tell you, life in the city is tough without friends.