What would you do if 600,000 people suddenly showed up in your city?
That’s what Claudia Lopez, the mayor of Bogota, has faced over the past few years, as her city of 7 million has housed the largest share of the 8 million Venezuelans forced to flee their failed state. Like many cities today, Bogota was already facing a housing-affordability crisis and an overloaded transit system.
But she didn’t want the streets or parks of the Colombian capital to be packed with desperate refugees: “We had a moral debt to them,” she told me. In fact, she decided that they shouldn’t be seen as refugees or as Venezuelans at all, but as “new Bogotans” with the same access to jobs, housing, schools and public health as any Colombian citizen. “I felt it was our obligation to give the new Bogotans the same things we were working to provide for the old Bogotans who are poor,” she said.
A similar set of decisions had to be made even more quickly by Jacek Sutryk, the mayor of Wroclaw, Poland. His city saw its population rise by more than a third in a matter of months, as more than 200,000 Ukrainians flocked in after the second Russian invasion began on Feb. 24, 2022. At first, they stayed in refugee tent cities built by the United Nations on the city’s periphery. But by last September, it was apparent that a big share of the Ukrainians, mostly women and children, weren’t only staying for a few months. The kids would need schools; their families and their businesses would need to become part of the city.
An even tougher burden was faced by Andriy Sadovyi, the mayor of Lviv. The western Ukrainian city of a million has seen 5 million people pass through as they flee the Russian missiles, so the city has been housing up to 2 million extra people a day. Almost every family home has become a boarding house. Lviv has also become the place where the wounded are sent: at least 30,000 injured soldiers and civilians are here at any time, causing Mr. Sadovyi to turn a big swathe of his city into the “recovery ecosystem.”
Inside the life-or-death journey of one Venezuelan family
The big international crises of our time overwhelmingly manifest themselves at the municipal level, leaving not national governments but cities to take on the biggest burden. That was the message I heard from dozens of mayors this week at the Brussels Urban Summit, an event – the first of its kind since the pandemic began – that has brought together more than 150 mayors from around the world.
I was astonished by the number of mayors who told me their biggest challenges in the last two years have involved world-changing catastrophes involving hundreds of thousands of people – the sort of scale that most cities used to struggle to handle over decades, but has unfolded over a few months or years.
The municipalization of global crises is certainly not all about sacrifice and heroism. The mayor of Gaziantep, Turkey, Fatma Sahin, has been praised over the past decade for having incorporated 500,000 Syrian refugees into her city of 2 million since 2011. And they were doubly displaced after Gaziantep was devastated by the Feb. 6 earthquake. But her sunny presentation, full of praise for newly re-elected president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, failed to mention that Turkey never really allowed the Syrians to become integrated – they have only temporary status – and that her Justice and Development Party appears to be planning to expel hundreds of thousands of them.
The most impressive responses have come from those mayors who are not simply spending emergency funds from the capital, but who are taking on burdens that their national governments have refused or rejected.
A big reason why Polish cities such as Wroclaw and Warsaw have been so good at rescuing Ukrainians is that they are governed by opposition figures who have spent years resisting the closed and xenophobic policies of the national government. The same can be said in Hungary and Turkey, where democratic values are being kept alive (in the face of deeply illiberal national leaders) by the mayors of the big cities.
And New York, of all places, was cited as an inspiration by many of the mayors here. After Texas Governor Greg Abbott cynically forced an estimated 100,000 migrants to travel to the megalopolis, it has responded by devoting much of its bureaucracy, and billions of dollars, to making them feel at home – buying up dozens of hotels full of rooms, getting all the kids in school, and changing national laws to make it possible for them to work.
It hasn’t been perfect or frictionless. But it shows that even the largest and most unaffordable communities can come together fast when a global crisis strikes them – and that the lowest levels of government are often more flexible and resilient than the states and countries around them.
Doug Saunders