RC21 CONFERENCE 2013
Resourceful cities
Berlin (Germany), 29-31 August 2013
Humboldt-University Berlin, Institute for Social Science, Dept. for Urban and Regional Sociology
Community resilience in the urban context
As the world becomes more urbanised, and cities grow exponentially larger, the effects of major disruptions such as floods and hurricanes and terrorist attacks, as well as more subtle disruption such as growing inequality and migration, become more intense. These disruptions have significant consequences on social and economic infrastructure, governance and the urban environment. However, the longer term effects are often highly localised and require local responses, yet the ability of the ‘local’ to recover from and be resilient to exogenous shocks is not straightforward. In the developing world, access to the wider resources of civil society and strong institutions is limited. In more developed contexts, urban communities are characterised by high levels of mobility and spatially diffuse networks, and the material benefits of local relationships and collective processes that aid response to, and recovery from, disruptive events remain unclear. This session seeks to critically examine the socio-structural characteristics and the cultural dynamics associated with community resilience in urban contexts. It will consider the factors that promote community resilience to subtle social disruptions (e.g. growing socio-economic inequalities, increased immigration and growing levels of ethnic heterogeneity) and those associated with resilience following large scale disasters (such as flood, fires, earthquakes or anthropogenic disasters). Additionally, it will explore the internal and extra-local conditions, resources and mechanisms that might allow a geographical community to absorb impacts and cope with major disruption.
This session welcomes papers that examine the following topics:
- The features and forms of urban resilience
- Identifying and/or mitigating risk in the city
- Growing urbanisation and the relevance of the ‘local community’
- Partnerships, governance and shared responsibility in the city
- The consequences of network diffusion for localised resilience
- Social networking tools and their capacity to evaluate localised cohesion and resilience
- Pathways and mechanisms that lead to either resilience or vulnerability in the urban context
- Ethnic, religious, cultural and ideological issues that hinder/promote resilience
Session Organizer
Dr. Lynda Cheshire, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, T: +61(0)7 3365 2383. E: l.cheshire@uq.edu.au
« back
