The emergence of Urban Community Resilience Initiatives During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An International Exploratory Study (original) (raw)

Civic Resilience and the COVID-19 Crisis in Urban Asia

Journal of Geographical Science, 2021

Civil society responses including self-help and mutual aid have played an important role in addressing the COVID-19 crisis around the world, including Asia. They represent a form of civic resilience, the ability of citizens and communities to cope with and adapt to social, economic, and environmental disturbances. But how exactly did communities and social groups in Asia self-organize to address challenges during the pandemic, particularly those facing the most vulnerable populations in society? What did these cases have in common? What can we learn from these civil society responses for future planning? What were the roles of researchers, spatial planning professionals, and institutions in strengthening community resilience? This article presents outcomes from a two-part webinar titled "Bottom-Up Resilience" that took place in July 2020 featuring activists, organizers, and researchers from Hong Kong, Manila, Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, and Tokyo. Preliminary findings include contrasting responses from institutions and civil society actors, how the civil society responses have built upon and expanded trust and empathy in a given place, how civil society responses scale up, and such scalability has depended heavily on solidarity and collaboration. The article further discusses how these efforts represent a form of civic resilience, the continued barriers, and implications for spatial planning practices.

Harnessing Covid-19 Experiences in Pandemic Regions for a Tentative Framework of Urban Resilience

RSA Regions, 2021

This article examines the practices and approaches taken by different countries with a high number of cases and distinctive responses to the Covid-19 outbreak within six World Health Organization (WHO) regions (Figure 2) from the perspective of urban resilience. The six regions in question represent the WHO’s organizational-purpose grouping with geographical terms, which is the way the WHO publishes its statistics. Pandemic resilience literature takes a fragmented approach to specific management areas or adaptation strategies. Findings suggest the need for a comprehensive approach that covers the different perspectives of resilience. Thus, this paper offers a tentative conceptual framework consisting of prominent factors including a strategy map, which might enable a broader perspective to guide recovery from future pandemics.

The ‘resilience’ of community organisations during the COVID-19 pandemic: absorptive, adaptive and transformational capacity during a crisis response

Voluntary Sector Review

This Research Note applies the concept of ‘resilience’ to explore how Neighbourhood Networks in Leeds in the UK – 37 local community organisations supporting older people – responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights how understanding resilience as a capacity that can be absorptive, adaptive or transformative helps describe the response of community organisations during the pandemic, highlighting a process of ongoing adjustment and innovation as the pandemic evolved. We suggest that the concept of resilience is helpful in this context for understanding how community organisations responded to the emergent nature of the crisis, but it is less effective at revealing why that may have been the case. This limitation notwithstanding, we argue that absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacity ought to be desirable attributes of community organisations if they are distributed equitably and enable them to fulfil their mission and contribute to social change.

Community resilience to pandemics: An assessment framework developed based on the review of COVID-19 literature

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2022

The COVID-19 outbreak in 2019 and the challenges it posed to communities around the world, demonstrated the necessity of enhancing the resilience of communities to pandemics. In this regard, assessment frameworks can play an essential role and guide resilience-building efforts. However, the lack of a comprehensive assessment framework has led to a focus on sectoral evaluation. This study aims to propose an integrated framework for assessing the pandemic resilience of communities. For this purpose, we rely on a systematic review of literature indexed in major academic databases. We have thoroughly analyzed a total number of 115 related documents to extract relevant criteria. Findings show that many criteria and factors affect community resilience to pandemics. By inductive content coding in MAXQDA software, we have categorized these criteria into five dimensions of Institutional, Social, Economic, Infrastructural, and Demographic. Good leadership and management, insurance and governmental support, planning and preparation, expertise and labor, and available equipment and technologies are the most important institutional criteria. Communication and collective identity, mutual support, public safety and protection, public awareness, and social justice are the influential social criteria. Economic sustainability and resource availability are criteria of economic resilience. Sufficiency of services, public spaces, housing tenure, and transportation system are the main criteria related to the built environment and infrastructural dimension. Finally, demographic resilience includes physical health, psychological well-being, life quality, and hygiene. Based on these criteria, this study develops an integrated evaluation framework that researchers can implement along with conventional assessment and ranking methods to determine the level of community resilience to pandemics.

Exploring the role of City Networks in supporting urban resilience to COVID-19 in conflict-affected settings

Open Health

Background: It is estimated that by 2050, almost 70 percent of the global population will be residing in urban areas. In recent years, cities have become central in tackling key urban challenges and have demonstrated greater flexibility in policymaking and innovation than national governments. Cities are currently more inclined to learn from each other via networks, partnerships, and pairings to develop solutions to many global challenges including pandemics such as COVID-19. Aim: To explore the role cities and city networks present in supporting urban resilience to pandemics focusing on conflict-affected settings. Methods: A desk-based literature review of academic and grey sources was conducted followed by thematic analysis. Results: Although most COVID-19 response plans have been developed and implemented by governments, the pandemic has revealed the significant potential for city networks in providing platforms for knowledge sharing and coordination of mitigation plans to addres...

What to Learn from Vulnerable Regions for Healthy Cities: Extracting Embedded Components of Covid-19 Practices

Review of World Planning Practice. Volume 18: Towards Healthy Cities: Urban Governance, Planning and Design for Human Well-being, 2022

The aim of this research is to go beyond the reading of vulnerability based on indicators. This study seeks to explore the ‘embedded’ components that are ignored in Covid-19 process management and related indices/indicators and discuss healthy city policies through these components, by harnessing good practices and collective actions. The research sample (see Figure 4) comprises good practices in countries with high vulnerability in the Global South, namely Brazil, Turkey, India, South Africa, and China. A number of countries, including these, were firstly examined for their responses to the Covid-19 process in pandemic regions within the framework of urban resilience (Aygün Oğur et al., 2021). In addition to this elaboration, some parameters, including socio-economic structure, social, economic and spatial vulnerability of the countries, extent of social inequality, virus transmission rate in the population, data availability, and existence of alternative management approaches to Covid-19, singled out these countries for analysis. The role of different socio-spatial components in creating and governing healthy cities, which will be analyzed qualitatively, will be considered through an examination of collective actions in these practices, rather than stereotyped vulnerability indicators.

Building Back Better: Fostering Community Resilient Dynamics beyond COVID-19

Social Sciences, 2022

In light of the COVID-19 crisis and its deep impacts worldwide, questions arise of how to be prepared against and cope with pandemics in particular and disruptions in general. The coronavirus not only posed a physical health threat but caused detrimental effects on people's social lives, adding concerns for individual and collective wellbeing. Herein, within a qualitative explorative case study from Merano (Northern Italy) combining two strands of literature, namely post-disaster recovery and community resilience, 14 semi-structured interviews were conducted with key informants. The interviews served as methodological tool to explore six dimensions (cultural, physical, economic, social, institutional, and ecological) of the local community resilience in the wake of the COVID-19 disaster, and the elements that can further strengthen it. Results show that although there are some networks in place for people to rely on and to support each other, there is still much room for improvement, especially for what concerns local institutional policies. The results are expected to be useful for policy making and for long-term, sustainable, and inclusive management of the risks posed by COVID-19 and future crises looming on the horizon, such as climate change.

Identifikasi Ruang Manuver Menuju Resiliensi Komunitas di Masa Pandemi Covid-19 Identifying Room for Maneuver towards Community Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021

Since firstly announced as an infectious case in Indonesia in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted to the economy, society, culture, education, and the environment. Although the government has moved with various stimuli, policies and continues to improve vaccination programs, there are still many things that ultimately force people, communities, and individuals to move independently as a form of resilience to this pandemic situation. Community Architects (ARKOM) and informal communities within this group network have worked for a long time in realizing inclusive, disaster-responsive, and participatory settlements. Through a participatory and bottom-up approach that places the community as the main subject of development, ARKOM has succeeded in making a significant contribution to the growth of community resilience to disasters. However, the COVID-19 pandemic presents different challenges than previous disasters. As a new model of disaster, the COVID-19 presen...