Forced Displacement in the Global South: A Growing Urban Crisis

Forced displacement in the Global South is the expulsion of people from their homes and livelihoods by conflict, disasters, development projects and urban violence, and it is a growing crisis increasingly concentrated in cities: the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre recorded in 2023 nearly 76 million people displaced within their own countries, the highest figure ever counted, and evictions for large projects affect millions more each year that no global statistic captures. Two authors have explained how the city produces and receives that displacement: Mike Davis, who in Planet of Slums (2006) showed that informal settlements grow through expulsion from the countryside and demolition in the city, and Teresa Caldeira, who in City of Walls (2000) documented how violence and segregation push São Paulo's poor to ever more distant peripheries.

Mike Davis: from countryside to settlement and from settlement to eviction

Davis reconstructs the first chain. Urbanization in the South since the 1980s followed not industrialisation but structural adjustment: agricultural liberalisation, wars and droughts expelled millions from the countryside toward cities without formal jobs, and the retreat of the state left them in self-built settlements on hillsides, riverbanks and dumps. That population is then the first displaced by the city itself when the land it occupies becomes valuable: the evictions of Makoko in Lagos in 2012 and Otodo Gbame in 2017, the removals in Delhi before the Commonwealth Games of 2010 or in Rio de Janeiro before the World Cup and the Olympics, which affected tens of thousands of families, follow the pattern Davis described as the war on the urban poor.

Teresa Caldeira: violence, walls and expulsion to the periphery

Caldeira adds violence as an engine. In São Paulo, the rise of crime and fear since the 1980s produced fortified enclaves for the upper and middle classes, and an everyday violence, criminal and police, that strikes the peripheries above all; those who cannot pay for private security or decent housing move to more distant and precarious areas where risk increases. Violence, in her analysis, is not only physical but institutional: policies that do not recognise settlements, police acting as an occupying force and plans that prioritise profitable zones perpetuate exclusion and turn internal migration into a continuous movement toward the edge.

Climate: the fastest-growing cause and the risk reproduced in the city

Climate is the third cause and the fastest growing. Floods, cyclones and droughts displaced more than 26 million people in 2023, most in Asia and Africa, and many end up in cities or are displaced within them, because informal settlements occupy precisely the floodable land and unstable slopes nobody else wanted. Jakarta, which is sinking, or Dhaka, which receives the displaced of Bangladesh's deltas, show that climate displacement is doubly urban: it arrives in the city and is reproduced there when adaptation projects, dikes, relocations, evict those who live in the risk.

International standards and alternatives: intervening without expelling

International law offers tools that are little applied. The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement of 1998, the United Nations guidelines on evictions of 2007 and the World Bank's resettlement standards require consultation, alternatives and compensation, and experiences such as settlement upgrading without displacement in Medellín, the regularisation of settlements in Brazil under the City Statute or negotiated resettlement with dwellers' federations in India show that it is possible to intervene without expelling. Michael Cernea's studies of resettlement demonstrated that, without those guarantees, the displaced person almost certainly becomes poorer: losing land, work, networks and health.

The lesson of Davis and Caldeira is that forced displacement is not an accident of urbanization but one of its mechanisms: the Southern city grows by expelling the very people who build it, from countryside to settlement and from settlement to periphery. Stopping that crisis requires recognising tenure, planning adaptation with the residents of risk zones, subjecting large projects to international standards and treating security as a public service rather than a privilege. Without that, every new investment, every mega-event and every dike will keep producing displaced people the statistics do not count.