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Post-industrial communities across the world are transitioning from industrial economies and identities to an uncertain future. Their successful transitions depend on communities’ abilities to navigate change and maintain a quality of life, or their community’s resilience. Previous scholarship offers resources and capabilities that facilitate or inhibit community resilience such as leadership, social capital, and information. However, collective memory is not well integrated within the community resilience literature. Drawing on data from interviews with 33 community leaders in the town of Anaconda, Montana, we illuminate the impact of collective memory on community resilience. The Anaconda Smelter Stack stands out as a specific landmark and prominent feature of the built environment that perpetuates particular collective memories in Anaconda. We find that collective memory is an integral part of community resilience, where memories can aid in a community’s recovery and rebuilding or constrain thinking and divide viewpoints. We argue that ignoring collective memory’s connections to resilience can undermine efforts to face changes in these communities.
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Overemphasis on recovery inhibits community transformation and creates resilience traps
Abstract Building community resilience in the face of climate disasters is critical to achieving a sustainable future. Operational approaches to resilience favor systems’ agile return to the status quo following a disruption. Here, we show that an overemphasis on recovery without accounting for transformation entrenches ‘resilience traps’–risk factors within a community that are predictive of recovery, but inhibit transformation. By quantifying resilience including both recovery and transformation, we identify risk factors which catalyze or inhibit transformation in a case study of community resilience in Florida during Hurricane Michael in 2018. We find that risk factors such as housing tenure, income inequality, and internet access have the capability to trigger transformation. Additionally, we find that 55% of key predictors of recovery are potential resilience traps, including factors related to poverty, ethnicity and mobility. Finally, we discuss maladaptation which could occur as a result of disaster policies which emphasize resilience traps.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1826161
- PAR ID:
- 10383627
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature Communications
- Volume:
- 12
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-1723
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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