A new report proposes that refugee camps should be relabeled refugee cities. The core of the argument is, that there would be spezial enterprise zones (SEZs), offering business opportunities for the inhabitants. The SEZs would benefit the refugees as well as the host country and investors, creating jobs and giving refugees useful skills. The report argues that governments would then welcome refugees instead of seeing a burden in them.
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Shenzhen as a best-practice
SEZs are designated areas in a country with differing business and trade laws. There new ideas could be tested without the necessity of changing the laws in the whole nation. Shenzhen in China is an example, that works remarkably well since the 1980s, and allows free-market policies.
The report says, that right now refugees avoid the camps due to the lack of opportunities they offer.
Refugee Cities is a US-based NGO and was founded by Michael Castle Miller. He said: „ The aims of the project are to expand opportunities for migrants and to thereby allow them to find dignity, meaning, and a social and economic future.“
Refugee cities would enable the inhabitants to rebuild their home country with their new-found knowledge and psychological strength, once they return.
Top-down humanitarian aid fails
The Refugee Cities report claims, that 65.3 million people were displaces by the end of 2015. In Lebanon, one million Syrian refugees now make a quarter of the population, in Jordan, 600.000 refugees are a burden on the water resources. Refugee migration is an urgent strain on international relations. The report also states, that the international aid doesn’t meet the peoples basic needs or achieve a long-term goal and fails to make use of the aspirations and skills of the inhabitants. Refugees are often tempted to find illegal work in the host country.
The former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Kilian Kleinschmidt, agreed: „We’re doing humanitarian aid as we did 70 years ago.“
Refugee Cities has already won international support by the World Bank, who have committed to investing in refugee SEZs in Jordan and Ethiopia.
Migration and the shift of human population from rural areas to cities will be one of the defining factors of our century – a wave of urbanization is affecting a large part of the world’s population. Author Doug Saunders predicts this to be the last movement of this scale, with lasting consequences that might end the continuous growth of the human population.
The people who have packed up and abandoned their agricultural lives, create “arrival cities” on the outskirts of major urban agglomerations. Here they try to establish a new life and to integrate themselves socially and economically into the fabric of the existing city. Saunders sees this development happening in metropolises around the world: from Istanbul to Toronto, from Warsaw to Mumbai, from Nairobi to Shenzhen. Many of these arrival cities are overlooked or even destroyed as city councillors and urban planners ignore their socio-political leverage.
The author shows that successful arrival cities can create an economically strong, confident middle class, while failed ones spawn poverty and social problems, even resulting in social unrest or violent conflict. The book reflects the development and current situation in a number of these city quarters, describes the underlying danger they are associated with, but also illustrates their potential – the opportunities that are created by providing citizenship, a chance to own property, education, transportation links, and good security.
Saunders used his extensive journalistic background and eye for human detail to compose a work that describes his research results in an objective and expert manner, while still vividly portraying the individual stories he encountered. His findings are organized in ten chapters illustrating different aspects of this urban phenomenon – over 500 pages of an in-depth view of a situation that is impossible to ignore even if we wanted to.
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