Context
This document provides guidance and presents findings from city consultations carried out by the World Humanitarian Summit Urban Expert Group in response to accelerating urbanization and the increasing vulnerability of cities in the context of humanitarian response. The document summarizes consultations in six cites recently or currently affected by man-made or natural disasters and summarizes key findings. The initiative was carried out by the Global Alliance within the framework of the AGORA initiative, IMPACT
and UCLG task force, and with the support of local governments.
Summary
The document outlines the consultation process in each city to evaluate lessons learned and guidance from a range of stakeholders, including municipal and national authorities. The document summarizes the cities that participated in the consultations and discusses the humanitarian response context for each specific location and disaster. The document discussed key challenges faced in humanitarian response in each context and provides recommendations for future urban crisis response in the humanitarian context.
For each recommendation provided, the document also provides a best practice example. These are:
- Systematically engage, build, and leverage local capacity, notably of municipalities and service providers
- Adopt a settlements-based approach for humanitarian response coordination
- Mainstream resilience building of city institutions and communities
- Deploy more flexible and longer-term funding modalities
- Establish a city-level coordination mechanism
- Systemically identify mechanisms to build understanding between international and local actors.
- Invest in Preparedness, Knowledge, and Capacity Transfer
- Mainstream action to promote harmony and mitigate community tension
