New website houses resources for communities that faced forced evictions

MIT’s Displacement Research & Action Network launched a new website that houses a displacement mapping tool and other resources for communities that have already faced forced evictions and displacement or are already threatened by this devastating global phenomenon. Aligning with the Network’s focus on development and market induced displacement, the website’s centers on cases of forced evictions associated with development (such as large dams, mega events, urban renewal and redevelopment including large-scale infrastructure projects).

Members of ESCR-Net have contributed to the resources available on the site with academics from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), Harvard, Northeastern and New York University (NYU) and the Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN). MIT’s Displacement Research & Action hopes that the platform will ignite a global discussion on issues surrounding forced evictions and internal displacement, notably the lack of an enforceable framework to ensure the human rights of internally displaced persons.

The Displacement Research and Action Network, an initiative of the Program for Human Rights and Justice at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, is the first-ever inter-disciplinary and cross-sectoral global network on displacement. Founded in 2012 by MIT DUSP Professor Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the Network has been shaped by Miloon Kothari, the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, who is a Martin Luther King Visiting Scholar at DUSP, with contributions from Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. The Network brings together activists, academics and policy makers to build new theory and evidence of the increasing incidence of mass internal displacement around the world due to development, conflict, or climate disaster.