In this episode, I had a discussion with Dr. Romola Sanyal , Associate Professor of Urban Geography at the London School of Economics. Romola has a PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on forced migration and urbanisation.
In one strand of her research, she looks at how refugees and other forced migrants become ‘city makers’ through building and inhabiting urban spaces. In this work, she has studied Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut and Partition refugee colonies in Calcutta.
A second strand of her work looks at the geopolitics of humanitarian knowledge production, particularly on urban refugees. Titled urban humanitarianism, this strand of research looks at how humanitarian organizations come to learn from and intervene in urban areas through various experiments and what politics are involved in building and sharing that knowledge.
Her work has been published in a number of journals including Urban Studies, IJURR, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and Political Geography. She is co-editor of Urbanizing Citizenship: Contested Spaces in Indian Cities (with Dr Renu Desai, Sage India, 2011) and Displacement: Global Conversations on Refuge (with Dr Silvia Pasquetti, Manchester University Press, 2020).
In this podcast Romola talks about her research on urban displaced populations and refugees. In particular, she discusses urban humanitarian policies to support displaced people in cities explaining the pros and cons of the neighbourhood approach.
🎙Listen to our podcast
Read more about this
Sanyal, Romola (2021), Making urban humanitarian policy: the “neighborhood approach” in Lebanon. Urban Geography. 1 – 21. ISSN 0272-3638
Pasquetti, S. and R. Sanyal (2020), Displacement: Global conversations on refuge, Manchester University Press, Accessed May 4, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv13842z8.
