Haiti, the former “pearl of the caribbean” is considered a failed state today, “the poorest country of the western hemisphere”. This process is due to internal and external intervention that shaped the structure of the country. Neoliberal intervention especially in the agricultural sector led to a rural exodus, which furthered the centralization around the capital Port-au-Prince. The result of this process was a massive population growth as well as an increase in slum dwellings. The earthquake of January 12th, 2010 killed not only 250 000 people, it also made 1.5 million people homeless. Today, there are still 500 000 people living in camps. Grassroots initiatives evolved within those IDP camps. Camp committees claim participation in the restructuring process. An important factor in the emergency and long term assistance are the many international nongovernmental organizations in Haiti. There is an estimated 14,000 NGOs on the ground. The per capita ratio in the “Republic of NGOs” is as high as nowhere else in the world. Many of those organizations work in the shelter or housing sector and therefore considerably influence the process of urban reconstruction. The earthquake not only destroyed a large part of the housing structure of cities like Port-au-Prince, Léogâne and Jacmel, it also led to an immense increase of rental charges of the living space left. The major part of unaffected living space is rented to foreign NGO and UN workers who push the rents through their mere presence. Long-established residents are no longer able to compete with the housing market prices and suffer from a structural displacement to far outlying districts that offer no infrastructure of at all Not only the immediate victims of the earthquake suffer from internal displacement in camps and the forced evictions out of them, but also those who were initially spared from destruction through the earthquake. The proposed paper seeks to analyze the ambiguous role of international NGO intervention in the urban reconstruction process in post-earthquake Haiti as well as the acts of resistance against the negative effects, especially of refugees in the IDP camps.
