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Can humanitarian responses in urban areas reinforce underlying causes of vulnerability? Tweaking a livelihoods analysis of inequality and infrastructure in splintering cities

This paper was invited at a pivotal moment for the international humanitarian sector: 10 months after the Haiti earthquake and as the IASC approved its plan to meet humanitarian challenges in urban areas by strengthening analysis of vulnerability, resilience and targeting. The paper argues for new humanitarian thinking on vulnerability that recognises the underlying systems and power relations shaping different places in a city. For the first time, an analogy is made between humanitarian action and the inter-disciplinary evidence on patchy infrastructure, offering a timely bridge between urban theory and the experience of practitioners on the ground in Haiti.