MONITORING URBAN DISPLACEMENT: A New Methodology for Tracking Informal Settlement Eviction

The informal settlement of land is the predominant mode of urban development in the global South, yet residents continue to face forced eviction, which threatens their lives and livelihoods. Monitoring the demolition of informal settlement has been a thorny problem, with on-the-ground monitoring being resource intensive and often intermittent. This is an initial report on the use of a new methodology using interpretative mapping of satellite imagery to document trends in the eviction rate of cities in the global South. This intervention examines current approaches to monitoring urban displacement and discusses the methodological opportunities and challenges of a complementary approach combining satellite imagery with on-the-ground enumerations. Through preliminary use of this methodology on a sample of 30 cities in the global South, it is found that over the past two decades, evictions increased in the period 2003–10, after which eviction initially decreased, but subsequently levelled off past 2015.