Paper details

Paper authors	sophie komujuni
In panel on	Post-Humanitarian Ecologies: from Spill-over Effects to Ambiguous Territorial Control in Chronic and Recurring Crises
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

This paper focuses on the urban outcomes of protracted humanitarian intervention in Gulu town, Northern Uganda. Using the concept of humanitarian urbanism, we demonstrate how intensive external donor-aid has shaped urbanization in the capital of Northern Uganda. The starting point for our analysis is the recent process of withdrawal of humanitarian NGO’s and the shifts from humanitarian- to development interventions. This shift was characterized by a special focus on urban development, coordinated by the Ugandan state while largely donor supported. We argue that this shift, instead of introducing an urban involvement of aid agencies in Gulu town, actually reveals a protracted continuum of aid agencies’ interventions in Gulu’s urbanity. The current withdrawal of humanitarian organisations in fact makes the long-term effects these interventions extra visible. As such, it offers an interesting starting point to investigate processes of humanitarian urbanism and its profound impacts on the urban material, socio-economic and political landscape. This paper demonstrates how aid agencies, since the armed conflict in Northern Uganda, have been key actors in shaping different dimensions of urban governance. Three case-studies are presented, zooming in on the urban educational sector, Gulu’s physical urban planning and Gulu’s cultural institution. They reveal how today’s reconfigurations of the urban aid-landscape have redrawn the complex relations between urban inhabitants, aid agencies and the Ugandan state, without changing the internal logics of humanitarian urbanism.

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