Toward a community resilience assessment: exploring fertile soils in the spanish context

Abstract

Over the last few years, the concept of resilience has been increasingly used in scientific and policy circles. In particular, the focus on the potential role played by communities in enhancing resilience has been slowly moving from risk management perspectives to approaches more in line with the quality of life and sustainability. In alignment with this vision, the Transition Movement aims to provide answers from the bottom-up, by guiding local communities in building resilience to peak oil, climate change and economic crisis. Besides being globally recognized as an urgent and important issue, it is still unexplored how to assess and measure, in a holistic way, community resilience. This paper attempts to improve the understanding of community resilience assessment in cities by: i) reviewing the existing resilience assessment tools, identifying gaps and development potential, and ii) offering a first integrated multiperspective assessment tool, for evaluating the baseline condition (or “fertile soil”) and barriers for building community resilience focusing on the Spanish municipalities context. Findings demonstrate that the currently available assessment tools from the literature have complementary strengths but lack context-specificity and should be complemented by groundbased inputs. Indeed, the proposed assessment matrix for the Spanish case is built on a set of integrated perspectives from a variety of actors and morphological data from case studies within the country, in order to address municipalities’ assets, accelerating factors or barriers for building community resilience. A significant number of the proposed indicators resulted to be mostly qualitative measures, rather than quantitative criteria, been also temporally comprehensive, able to assess the evolutionary nature of resilience and its cross-scales networks influencing actions. This study constitute a first step toward the assessment of community resilience emerging from fieldwork across Spanish towns, and calls for further research addressing a more comprehensive set of data, as well as comparison cases from other countries in order to critically understand key differences and similarities among common barriers and ideal baseline conditions for building community resilience in our mostly unsustainable cities.