The project investigates how human, social, and economic relations, exchange and consumption experiences can better inform humanitarian policies and practices; both of which regulate access and relations to services, labour, and resources in the countries which host urban refugees. Taking the perspective that markets of commodities, labour, and housing can be studied as social practices, it uses the notion of the “market” as the sociological field of investigation. As such, the research looks at the site where daily practices of informal and institutional actors are enmeshed, changing the urban environment they inhabit and share. The project looks specifically at cities where large numbers of de facto refugees have relocated over time, and where there is a presence of humanitarian agencies addressing ‘refugee crises’. Through an analysis of the socio-economic behaviours of refugees, local residents, and humanitarian actors, this research seeks to improve understandings of how local hardships, opportunities for livelihoods, and daily habits, interplay. More specifically, in the material and symbolical space of the “urbanitarian” moment, it analyses informal processes of self-recovery or self-support. This programme intends to combine different empirical research examples, which shed light on the relevance of “theories of practice” for improving assistance provision policy and understanding urban transformations.