Lucy Earle

Lucy Earle’s work focuses on the intersections of urbanisation, urban poverty and humanitarian crises, in particular forced displacement into and within urban areas.

She is especially interested in understanding how refugees and internally displaced people navigate urban systems to meet their basic needs, and how displaced people can engage with local authorities to raise awareness of their needs, priorities and aspirations. She also works to change the narrative about where displaced people ‘belong’ – highlighting, through research and policy engagement, the potential benefits of hosting refugees and internally displacement people in towns and cities. Lucy has a background working on low-income housing, urban citizenship and the right to the city in the global South.

Lucy is currently leading work to develop a tool to measure the wellbeing of people living in protracted displacement in urban areas, currently focused on Nairobi, Kenya and Amman, Jordan. This builds on a recently-completed £3m GCRF-funded project on protracted displacement, that compared the wellbeing and livelihoods of displaced people in camps with those in urban areas. 

She is also leading interdisciplinary work on the cost of camps, and the potential benefits of hosting refugees in cities. She recently co-guest-edited a special issue of IIED’s journal Environment and Urbanization on ‘Forced displacement and the city’.