COMMUNITY RESILIENCE

Learning Objectives

1. To gain a preliminary understanding of the concept of resilience and community resilience.

2. To understand resilience related to communities’ agency of empowerment.

3. To introduce a number of principles and tools for resilience that can be considered by communities.

CHALLENGING PRACTICE: MODULE HANDBOOK

Resilience

The term resilience comes from the Latin resilire, meaning ‘to rebound or recoil’ and was used initially in physics and material sciences to describe the ability of material properties to withstand large forces and shocks.

Work on resilience was further popularised in academia in the 1960s-70s by Crawford Holling (1973) who introduced the concept to an ecology audience. It was then further developed across disciplines, and subsequently entered the mainstream academic discourse via ‘social-ecological resilience’ with a focus on ‘socioecological systems’ (Folke, 2006). In the last few decades, definitions of resilience have proliferated in many different fields – ie physics, ecology, business studies, psychology, geography, social science, urban and regional planning (see eg. Shaikh and Kauppi 2010; Holling 1973, Werner 1995; Godschlak 2003, Timmerman 1981). This has led to a deeper understanding of the conditions required by complex socio-ecological systems to thrive with uncertainty and unpredictable change.

Currently, due to increased global challenges (Climate Change, social and economic inequality, food security, natural preservation, resources depletion, recession etc.), the ‘resilience imperative’ (Lewis and Conaty, 2012) has been fully recognised by international policy, as evidenced in recent frameworks (eg. Habitat III, COP21, World Urban Forum) becoming almost “a pervasive idiom of global governance” (Walker and Cooper, 2011, pp.144).

The discourse on resilience as adopted by policy is currently dominated by technological and environmental perspectives (ie. CIIP, EPHA), with little emphasis on social, cultural and political dimensions (Hornborg, 2009) or the ‘bottom-up’ practical perspective (Vale, 2014). This discourse is used to maintain a simplified rhetoric of ‘sustainability’ and to support technocratic and adaptive management fixing. Although resilience is put forward as a politically neutral term, this position is arguably framed within pervasive capitalist logic and vocabulary (Welsh, 2014).

Community resilience

Communities are major players in addressing global challenges in their local contexts. They need to thrive in long-term changing circumstances and adversity and to take meaningful, deliberate, collective action to remedy the impact of a problem while promoting social and ecological evolution.

Governments have started to recognise the essential role of community empowerment in resilience and to promote supporting policies, such as those advanced under the Big Society flagship program of the UK government. ‘Community resilience’ in these policies focuses however on community self-reliance and empowerment, by reducing the state contribution and encouraging volunteering and community activity (e.g. the Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience 2011). This type of ‘empowerment’ has been criticised for exhausting communities’ resources without offering economic and political support for long-term action (Welsh, 2014).

However resilience can also strengthen local communities and promote anticapitalist activist projects rather than maintaining dominant economic and political systems (Cretney & Bond, 2014; Hopkins, 2011; Goldstein, 2012). Examples of such projects can be found both in the Global North and South: R-Urban, Transition Towns, Incredible Edible, Stad in de Maak, Rotterdam in the Global North; Catalytic Communities (CatCom) and the favela Community Land Trust in Rio de Janeiro, the 100 Classrooms for refugee Children in Za’atari Vlllage in the Global South.

From ‘survival and mitigation’ to adaptive resilience

Communities are the key actors within the current shift in resilience approaches which, rather than mitigation, focus on adaptive capacity and potential for collective learning and acting together (DeVerteuil and Golubchikov, 2016) [link to module 11. Participation]. Nevertheless, community initiatives are often limited in scope and means, and cannot solve interrelated issues which need a more strategic approach. There is a need for integrating top-down and bottom-up policies and complementing strategically public and civic initiatives, particularly in relation to resilience governance (The Young Foundation, 2012).

Community resourcefulness and capability to act

Resourcefulness is a relatively new concept that addresses the necessity to identify, make available and redistribute resources of space, knowledge and power across local actors and communities to improve resilience. The notion of resourcefulness situates resilience in a more positive light, relating it to the agency of empowerment of the community (MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013). Such approaches to resilience, concerned with communal management of land and resources as a form of resistance to privatisation and globalisation, is often integrated within broader social movements fighting against social injustice and inequitable urban environments (Brown et al., 2012).

Resilience requires multi-agency working (Trogal and Petrescu, 2016) and ways of enhancing the ‘capability to act’ (Sen, 2009) of as many as possible. The R-Urban project is a concrete example in Europe of how this ‘capability to act’ towards resilience can be supported through networks of community hubs (Petrescu D, and Petcou C., 2015). An example from the Global South is the Kibera Public Space Project in Nairobi, Kenya. [link to module 10. Ethics in built environment practice].

Scaling

Community resilience processes usually take place at local scales: neighbourhood, city (Stevenson and Petrescu, 2016), involving mainly the most active community members and assuming that localising decision-making implies bringing about more socially just and ecologically sustainable outcomes. However, these processes need to overcome the ‘local trap’ (Purcell, 2006) in which many grassroots resilience initiatives tend to fall, due precisely to their vulnerability to scarce resources. Resilience is a global problem that needs to be approached both locally and translocally, considering the specificity, capability and collective knowledge of each locale and fostering global links between stakeholders and community groups (MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013). Shared methods, tools and cross-institutional structures are needed for expanding community resilience across scales and cultures in order to form trans-local alliances, networks and collaborative platforms (Baibarac and Petrescu, 2017).

Co-production

Communities can enhance their own capabilities and transformative agency by participating in the co-creation of tools and methods for building community resilience. Co-production can create new situations in which citizens, local authorities and other resilience agents (practitioners, NGOs, researchers) support each other and learn from each other in relational ways. Co-production can generate empowerment, innovation, collaboration, capacity building, and relational thinking (Wolfram and Frantzeskaki, 2016) and can support more open and deliberative processes (Pohl et al., 2010). [link to module 2. Theoretical Frameworks, module 11. Participation, module 13. Partnerships and module 15. Participatory design tools]

Involving communities in co-producing resilience together with local governments across the globe, can contribute to developing a new governance of urban production processes that are more socially and environmentally just, which can potentially contain the global warming within a range of 1.5–2.08C in order to prevent irreversible and truly catastrophic changes (Petrescu and Petcou, 2020).