Sharing knowledge on urban crises

Dear Colleagues,

We'd like to invite you to take a look at the new ALNAP / UN-Habitat Urban Humanitarian Response Portal: www.urban-response.org.

At the 27th ALNAP Annual Meeting 'The Urban Challenge: adapting humanitarian response to a changing world' members of the Network collectively recognised how far the humanitarian system has to go in being able to respond effectively to large-scale urban disasters. At the same time, the presentations at the meeting showed that humanitarian organisations are tackling many of the challenges head on, and coming up with improvements and solutions.
The Urban Portal is an attempt to bring our scattered learning about urban humanitarian response together in one place. It contains an ever-growing collection of reports, evaluations, meeting documents and lessons papers related to humanitarian action in cities; information on upcoming events; and a link to this online forum where we hope that you will want to share questions, opinions and ideas.

The value of the Portal will be determined by the degree to which all of us with an interest in urban humanitarian action contribute to ensure that the latest learning and information is available to the humanitarian as a whole. So we would warmly encourage you to:
   • Submit new documents to the Portal
   • Let us know of any events that we can publicise on the Portal
   • Use this forum to communicate with colleagues interested in the topic of urban humanitarian response
   • Suggest ideas for webinars - and volunteer to present at a webinar, if you have learning that you would like to share.
   • And, of course, to give us feedback on how we can make the Portal more useful to you.

Best wishes,
Paul and Ansa