Host Cities

Karen Jacobsen is the Henry J. Leir Professor of Global Migration at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University. She has won grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development and has consulted for nongovernmental and UN organizations, including the World Bank and UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency). She lives in Brookline, MA.

“Karen Jacobsen’s research helped put the distinctive challenges and opportunities facing urban refugees on the map. In this vital new work, Jacobsen moves the conversation forward, illuminating refugees’ distinctive experiences in cities, and the strategies they use to address the obstacles they encounter, in tandem with their allies.”—Megan Bradley, McGill University“Many refugees seek a new, safe life in cities—and also transform them. Jacobsen resists easy moralism, presenting displacement as neither crisis nor cure-all, but as a feature of our century and a catalyst that cities can squander or harness. The result is a deeply informed vision into one of the greatest global policy challenges of our time, and a rich sketch of a better path forward.”—Michael Clemens, George Mason University and the Peterson Institute for International Economics“A vivid and engaging examination of the lives of refugees and migrants in urban areas of the developing world. Jacobsen’s book explains how cities act as places of sanctuary and support for new arrivals, but also as locations where danger and precarity are prevalent.”—Jeff Crisp, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford“Host Cities makes a significant contribution to the literature on urban refugees. Karen Jacobsen pulls together a compelling story, based on years of field experience, about the impact of refugees on cities and the effects of urban life on refugees. Scholars, students, and the informed general reader will find Host Cities to be readable, informative, and compassionate—a trifecta found in few books.”—Susan Martin, Georgetown University