Fan, L.Shelter strategies, humanitarian praxis and critical urban theory post-crisis reconstruction

摘要

The paper seeks to link contemporary thinking on urban shelter the humanitarian sector to debates the field of 'critical urban theory'. It argues that current humanitarian thinking on urban shelter shares many common concerns with critical urban theory, but that these concerns are rarely translated effectively into humanitarian practice. It attributes this disconnect not only to weaknesses implementation capacity, but also to the need to reorient humanitarian action to address more definitively questions of power and justice. Humanitarian actors need to step back from product-delivery approaches and find ways of integrating into their analytical, planning, implementation and monitoring tools questions about access, exclusion and the historically specific ways which these aspects converge particular urban spaces. By doing so, the humanitarian community would benefit from a more explicit, systematic and sustained engagement with the catalytic theoretical resources that critical urban theory has to offer.