This book set out to explore the nexus of displacement and urbanization from the viewpoint of people living at the urban margins in four Somali cities. Building on narrative interviews and photovoice, and using a microsociological and micro-spatial lens, we explored what people actually do when they have been forced to flee and decide to come to and settle in a city. How do they find shelter and a place to stay? What do they (have to) do to sustain themselves and their families? What infrastructures and technologies do they use to manage their basic needs? How do they experience city life and what are their relationships with the people who are already resident in their immediate vicinity or in the wider city? Each chapter of the book has used different analytical entry points to answer these questions. It has looked at war and ecological shocks through an urban lens and explored migrants’ arrival and settlement at the urban margins. Here, specific sociospatial and socio-material constructions came into focus, along with the political and economic relations imbued in them. It then addressed material and digital infrastructures to explore the intersections of space, technology and society, both at the basic level of immediate human needs, as well as for the organization of flows and communicative networks necessary for livelihoods. Finally, it used resettlement approaches and practices to explore the spatio-social inequalities that are sustained and generated in policies that attempt to govern urbanization and city living.

Throughout the chapters, we have explored the power relations embedded in the categorizations and sorting of people by urban residents, political authorities and international organizations. While categorizing and sorting, people are policing society. Rancier (1999, 29ff.) emphasized how bodies are classified and named and thereby assigned ‘to a particular place and task’. This assignment also distributes the capacity to speak, to be heard and to become visible. We have shown how the figure of the IDP is assigned to the urban margins, placed in camps or squatter settlements, problematized, subjected to interventions and experiments for solutions – whether ‘durable’ or not. Agamben (1998) claimed that the refugee became the counterpart of the citizen, politically included in the state-dominated international order through their encamped exclusion.