Refugees in the City: How Humanitarian Migration Transforms Urban Areas

When people flee conflicts and other crises, most of them go to cities. Worldwide, approximately 70 percent of refugees live in urban areas, as do more than 40 percent of internally displaced people (IDPs).1 For many forced migrants, cities offer protection and hope for a brighter future. But the arrival especially of large numbers of refugees can also transform cities in positive and negative ways, by altering urban demographics and social cohesion; creating new demands for services, housing, and jobs; and by bringing new financial, skills, and other resources. 

These changes can either strain the host city or help it blossom. Recent displacement crises have shown that hosts’ initially positive response to displaced people can change if the cities are unable to provide the services and support that individuals—humanitarian migrants and long-term residents alike—need over the long term. Often, large-scale humanitarian migration exacerbates underlying urban tensions, which can create new animosities. 

Because refugees and IDPs often arrive suddenly and in large numbers, their arrival and continuing presence pose specific challenges for city leaders. This article, based in part on the author’s book, Host Cities: How Refugees Are Transforming the World’s Urban Settings, explores how humanitarian influxes differ from other kinds of immigration and examines the implications for host cities. It focuses primarily on urban areas in low- and middle-income countries, which is where most humanitarian migrants live, but also explores some repercussions in higher-income countries. 

Different from Other Urban Migration

The consequences of a humanitarian influx for a host city differ from slower, more voluntary in-migration in several ways.

One difference is the size and intensity. The acute phase of a humanitarian crisis, when many people flee an armed conflict or disaster, can unfold over a matter of days or weeks, with large numbers heading to cities across the border or within their own countries. Moreover, cities often encounter repeated waves of refugees. For example, Cairo saw a spike in Syrian arrivals in 2012; then, with the eruption of civil war in neighboring Sudan in 2023, hundreds of thousands of Sudanese made their way to the city. When natural disasters occur, displaced people tend to stay within their own country, many heading to cities or town, as was the case with Japan’s 2011 earthquake and the 2010 Haitian earthquake.

Not all humanitarian displacement begins with an emergency phase or the mass arrival of people, however; sometimes refugees arrive in smaller numbers over longer periods. Slowly unfolding displacement occurs when the crisis is drawn out or when people leave after being forewarned and believe that things will get worse, as was the case in Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s and in Venezuela after 2016. Well-resourced people with international networks are typically the first to leave, in part because they are able to transfer their assets to safer places and have time to relocate family members in a strategic way. As the conflict or crisis grows, the size of the outflow can increase rapidly.

A second difference is that humanitarian arrivals—but not other migrants—are usually followed by international resources and aid. Aid programs are especially important for low-income host countries where already under-resourced government services are strained by high numbers of arrivals. But humanitarian agencies impact host cities in other ways, too, including by providing employment and training for locals, creating demand for office space and housing, and by running programs or supporting health and education services that sometimes also include host populations.

Moreover, the pledges made by international donors to support refugee crises sometimes include enhanced support of all kinds—developmental, financial, and even trade-related. In response to the outflows during the Syrian civil war, for instance, the Global Concessional Financing Facility was created by the World Bank, the Islamic Development Bank Group, and other partners to provide billions of dollars in financing to middle-income countries hosting large refugee populations.2 Since the late 2000s, the private sector has also provided support, usually via donations from industry-associated foundations to meet corporate social responsibility requirements. However, donor funds are channeled through national governments, rather than host cities; while the money can trickle down to support city services, very little is given directly to city governments. More direct funding could be a boon for municipal governments, but there are many obstacles to restructuring financing in this way.

The presence of camps also reflects another difference with humanitarian movements. Formal camps are not the norm for host countries today—less than one-third of the world’s refugees and IDPs are in camps3—but in countries that do have encampment policies, camps are often situated near towns and cities. (While it is often assumed that refugee camps are located in remote areas near borders, they are sometimes created within range of cities; as cities expand, they may approach or even engulf camps.) Over time, the impact of camps on urban areas can be dramatic: Refugees and locals constantly move between city and camp to trade, socialize, and find employment, education, and even housing. Humanitarian agencies servicing the camp also bring resources which may become available to nearby towns.

A fourth difference lies in the responses of city authorities, citizens, and refugees themselves. A well-established pattern, across history and geography, is that citizens are especially sympathetic to and welcoming of refugees—at least initially. Displaced people are seen to be desperate and in need of help (even though many other migrants are also in need). The depth and extent of this initial sympathy is influenced by locals’ own history of displacement and the city’s historical experience with refugees. This displacement history partly explains why cities in the same country often differ in enforcing national policies toward refugees. For example, many host governments do not allow refugees to work, but in some cities or neighborhoods with long histories of displacement, authorities may turn a blind eye to those who work illegally. A city’s response changes over time, however, and its initial welcome may sour if the number of refugees increases and their stay becomes prolonged.

There are also some important differences in composition between refugee and other migrant populations in host cities. Urban refugee populations often include human-rights activists, journalists, and political actors who have been persecuted in their home countries. Perhaps because of this, refugees may be more likely than other migrants to mobilize politically in response to the problems they face. Increased political mobilization might also occur because refugees have more host advocates willing to support them.

How an Influx Impacts Host Cities

The arrival of large numbers of forced migrants has both immediate effects and longer-term consequences for a host city. Immediate effects show up in strains on city services, especially health services (increased visits to emergency rooms, clinics, and hospitals) and schools (larger classroom sizes). A city’s energy grid and transportation, water, and sanitation systems can also quickly become overburdened, especially if these systems are already fragile, as they often are in low- and middle-income countries and in older cities around the world. New arrivals increase the demand for housing and jobs, with consequences that ripple outward to impact political, social, and security dynamics. When local residents confront rising housing prices and a tighter job market, their initially welcoming attitude may change. These shifts are often leveraged by restrictionist groups and politicians who also blame refugees for crime and insecurity—claims often picked up by social and other media.

Negative impacts and responses are not inevitable; much depends on a city’s leadership. There are many examples of mayors and other city leaders who have responded positively to refugees’ arrival. For instance, the Mayors of the Americas Task Force on Migration in late 2025 invested more than $5 million to help five Latin American cities—Bogotá and Cali, in Colombia; Manta and Quito, in Ecuador, and Mexico City—implement solutions for economic inclusion.4

Sometimes changes in national policy manifest first at the city level. For example, Kenya was hosting about 100,000 refugees and asylum seekers in 1991, and there were nearly 836,000 in the country in 2025.5 In 2021, the government enacted a new Refugee Act which, among other things, aimed to end refugees’ encampment and offered freedom of movement, the right to work, and access to financial services.6 The law thereby recognizes the potential of urban refugees for Kenya’s future and gives cities more devolved powers, leading the city of Nairobi to launch its refugee integration strategy in April 2025.7 Implementation remains to be seen, but the strategy offers the city a chance to shine as a role model for other host cities.

Faced with a humanitarian influx, mayors’ offices and city agencies often lack the budget and personnel to address new pressures on housing and city services, especially in the short term. To make things more difficult, municipal authorities must deal with these challenges in the glare of media coverage. In the early days of sizeable refugee arrivals, local and international media often emphasize stories about refugees sleeping in city squares, overwhelmed services, and increases in crime. These kinds of stories were typical of the 2015-16 European migration and refugee crisis, particularly on Greek and Italian islands (especially Lesvos, Lampedusa, and Sicily), and also in Germany, Serbia, and the Nordic countries. This kind of media coverage aggravates the anxiety and fear of local residents, and can lead to political shifts against migrants and refugees.

Longer-Term Challenges, from Neighborhoods to City-Wide

Over the longer term, humanitarian arrivals can change the character of cities and neighborhoods. They can remix a neighborhood’s ethnic composition, aggravate cultural or religious fault lines, and stir up conflict. For example, as more religiously conservative Syrians fleeing the civil war moved into Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, some Lebanese residents became uncomfortable and moved to other neighborhoods. By contrast, in Ard al-Lewa, a low-income neighborhood in Cairo, young non-Muslim refugees from Eritrea and Sudan engaged in loud public drinking, infuriating locals. The arrival of refugees can thus create social and political tensions. It can also create economic tensions, especially in low-income neighborhoods with significant refugee concentrations. Refugees increase competition for jobs in certain sectors, but are often paid less and work longer hours than their local counterparts. All of this can create antagonism from locals, many of whom already struggle to find decent work and housing and now face increased competition and higher prices. In low-income neighborhoods, there are few workplace or housing protections for either refugees or locals, but refugees are more likely to endure abuse and wage discrimination, especially if they are working illegally (which is common, since many host countries do not permit refugees to work) and have no legal redress when employers and landlords exploit them.

These consequences play out most dramatically in neighborhoods with high refugee concentrations, but they have spillover effects for the wider city. As the activist Jane Jacobs explained in The Death and Life of Great American Cities back in 1961, one cannot understand a city by looking only at individual neighborhoods; cities are interwoven, cross-cutting “organic” wholes, where changes in one sector spill over to affect the entire city.8 In huge cities, these ripple effects might dissipate quickly, but in smaller cities they can be transformative.

Take housing, for example. The presence of large numbers of refugees in a particular neighborhood can set in motion a scramble for affordable housing: Landlords push up the rents in response to increased demand and make refugees in particular pay more, while developers build newer, more expensive housing. Rising prices might mean long-term residents have to move to poorer and more distant parts of the city. This chain of events has happened frequently, including when Ukrainians started coming to Poland’s border cities in 2022, when large numbers of Venezuelans began moving to Brazil and Colombia in 2016, and when Syrians fled to the border cities of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey after 2012. Rising property prices also result from the concomitant arrival of aid agencies requiring housing, office, and warehouse space, especially in smaller cities.

Another spillover effect concerns the environmental impact on a city. In low-income and informal areas of many cities, the physical infrastructure (water and sewer pipes, roads, and energy and waste plants) and public services (garbage removal and processing as well as water management) range from poorly maintained to nonexistent. Even in the absence of a humanitarian influx, many of these kinds of longstanding problems have been aggravated by climate-change-related strains, misguided urban policies, and corruption. Although wealthy areas of cities are also increasingly at risk of flooding—one need only look at Houston or Miami, both of which have seen inundations in recent years—flooding in low-income neighborhoods exposes residents to infectious disease and threatens their livelihoods.9 With these hazards already present, the arrival of large numbers of refugees or other migrants can overwhelm a city’s ability to cope with environmental and public-health threats.

In sum, many host cities are already struggling with decrepit infrastructure and under-resourced public services, and the arrival of large numbers of refugees can push systems and services into deeper failure. Pressures on housing, employment, transportation, schools, health care, and energy systems can lead to heightened social tensions and protests, which in turn can aggravate security problems and lead to new tensions and new displacement, both within and away from the city.

Opportunities for Urban Renewal

Despite these problems, refugees can have positive outcomes for a city, depending on how organizations, governments, and individuals—both long-time residents and migrants—respond. International and local concern for refugees can lead to new resources. When powerful and well-funded donors work with humanitarian and development agencies and city governments, they can build and support infrastructure and services. Their efforts can bolster those of community- and faith-based organizations that have been working to address neighborhood and city problems long before the arrival of refugees. Newcomers themselves organize to address the problems they face, often with the help of the longstanding diaspora resident population. Combined, inflows can bring new volunteers, funds, and expertise to address a city’s underlying challenges.

Opportunities for urban renewal are perhaps most visible in higher-income countries with refugee populations that arrive more gradually, via an orderly resettlement process. In the United States, many smaller towns that have lost population and industries have been rejuvenated by resettled refugees. Studies of U.S. towns including Fargo, North Dakota; Lewiston, Maine; and Burlington, Vermont have shown that refugees helped turn around these fading manufacturing and Rust Belt towns as they rebuilt their own lives.10 These are relatively small cities and the immigrant population is a minor percentage of the population. Urban renewal brought by refugees has been well documented in neighborhoods in several large cities in Australia, Europe, and North America.

There is growing documentation of this pattern in African and Asian cities, too, with notable book-length studies of cities in Pakistan and Africa.11 Refugees have transformed some African cities’ neighborhoods, including Nairobi’s Eastleigh, which is home to many Somalis.12 Lesser-known examples include Cairo’s satellite city of 6th October, where Syrian refugees have created a restaurant industry and other businesses.13 In Johannesburg’s Jeppestown area, refugees and other migrants have rejuvenated the downtown.14

Refugees bring their assets, skills, and entrepreneurship to city neighborhoods, and in the right circumstances their mobilization to help themselves also helps their neighbors. For instance, community schools set up by refugees for their children (who are often excluded from or harassed in public schools), or supported by UN or nongovernmental humanitarian agencies, may also be attractive to locals who recognize the improved instruction and seek to enroll their children there. In addition, public schools in host cities are often supported by humanitarian agencies, which can be beneficial to locals and migrants alike.15

In Africa in particular, there is still a rural bias on the part of many donor countries and philanthropies, which often concentrate funding and programs away from cities. A good example is Uganda, which hosts roughly 2 million refugees.16 Uganda has received hundreds of millions of dollars in external funding annually (from the United States, the European Union, and other donors) to support refugees.17 But the funds have almost all been aimed at rural areas in the north and west, where Uganda’s refugee settlements are located. Much less assistance has been available for refugees in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, where there were some 173,000 registered by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as of May 2026, and possibly many more unregistered.18 These refugees live in some of Kampala’s poorest neighborhoods.

Boom and Bust in the City

Providing humanitarian assistance in cities with multiple actors and political agendas, where refugees live alongside locals who often have needs as acute as those of refugees, is very much a work in progress, with some success stories and many challenges.

Refugees are often blamed for problems that were there long before they arrived. But do refugees make problems worse? The scapegoating of humanitarian migrants for crime and other problems is longstanding in many host and transit countries. While it cannot be denied that a humanitarian influx can bring short-term problems, refugees and other newcomers also benefit cities in the long run. Whether they are enabled to do so is largely determined by the responses of local leaders, international supporters, and the host city’s residents.

Sources

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Mayors Migration Council. 2025. Mayors Unlock $5M for Economic Inclusion and Regular Migration Pathways in Latin America, Call for More Funding. Press release, December 12, 2025.

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Nolan, Erin and Hurubie Meko. 2023. After Intense Floods, New York City Lurches Back to Life. The New York Times, September 30, 2023.

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