Porto Príncipe (Haiti) - Nas ruas do bairro de Bel Air, pessoas caminham pelos escombros. Algumas construções pegam fogo, pessoas resgatam objetos em edificios totalmente destruídos depois do terremotoWe are proud to announce our partnership with Global Alliance for Urban Crises, a global, multi-disciplinary and collaborative community of practice working to prevent, prepare for and effectively respond to humanitarian crises in urban settings.

Our program’s line of research, which focuses on rapidly urbanizing, post-conflict and post-disaster contexts, made us an ideal partner for this network, established in 2016 to bring together different actors who can help to improve crisis preparedness and response in our increasingly urban world. The alliance is the international community’s latest attempt to rethink disaster response in cities and find a more effective way to tackle humanitarian crises in urban settings. Other members include UN-Habitat, UNHCR, International Organization for Migration, Norweigan Refugee Ccoucil, RIBA Architecture and United Cities Local Governments, to name a few.

KEN_downtownNairobi_UNHabitatThe multi-stakeholder initiative, made up of a broad membership that includes actors not traditionally considered humanitarian responders—such as development actors, urban professionals and local authority networks—promotes a vision of inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable cities and towns in which urban communities, their leaders and members have the power, capacities and resources to address the risks and reality of humanitarian crises, to mitigate crisis impacts on the most vulnerable, including the displaced, and to enable affected people to determine, with dignity, the course of their lives and their futures.

eSxxnxFq_400x400The Global Alliance for Urban Crises arose out of consultations for the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) held in May 2016, during which a number of committed organisations led an urban expert group and developed a series of Urban Recommendations. The Alliance is the vehicle through which these recommendations will be put into action. It is guided by a series of principles, also developed by the urban expert group, as laid out in the Urban Crises Charter. The Alliance builds on the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s (IASC) ‘Strategy for Meeting Humanitarian Challenges in Urban Areas’, and the decision of the IASC Principals in April 2015 to adopt area-based approaches and surge capacity through local authorities.

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