Community resilience: role of community as coping mechanisms in urban transformations
Community resilience: role of community as coping mechanisms in urban transformations

Summary/Abstract: Cities today are a typical consortium of complex adaptive transformations that consider concepts of transformability, reversibility, adaptability, ephemerality, transience, and resilience. Cities constantly undergo a shift between stabilizing and destabilizing forces; rigidity and flexibility; exploitation and reorganization. These episodic changes induce periods of high resilience, giving scope for cities’ services, management and the community to adapt and recover from disequilibrium. Governance structures of today devise city networking strategies with citizens as frontrunners, carrying an intent to heighten accountability, autonomy while envisioning trust models in inter-organizational cooperation and active public participation. However, their roles in managing the shifts in the adaptive cycles have been sidelined as a formal attribute. This frames the premise of the paper. The paper dissects the complex adaptive cycles of a city and the need for resilient strategies under the larger lens of social capital. This instigates an in-depth study of the concept of social capital and collective action that induce self-organization as a coping mechanism to assess community’s adaptation in building community resilience. Community resilience through socio-spatial and policy connotations of social capital frames the primary objective of this paper, stressing the need to integrate community capacity and morphological aspects of an urban system.

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