Sustainable Community Development, Networks and Resilience (original) (raw)

In a changing and unpredictable world, sustainable community development is less a goal than a dynamic process of working with the resources and information at hand. In order to sustain this dynamic interactive process, com- munities need to anticipate and respond to these dynamics and nurture their resilience in order to innovate and diversify. This is par- ticularly difficult for communities that are marginalized, dealing with poverty, homelessness, and addic- tion. However, social capital can be harnessed to create the commu- nity agency needed to foster sus- tainable development. This paper focuses on the ability of commu- nity networks to build social capital critical to the creation of the resil- ience needed to sustain communi- ties. It draws on a case study of a community-driven initiative taking place on the East Side of the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, a community with very low levels of economic capital.