Rethinking community resilience: Critical reflections on the last 10 years of the Ōtautahi Christchurch recovery and on-going disasters

Abstract

The legacies of mechanistic and scientific approaches towards community resilience are increasingly challenged for lacking insight and nuance. They fail to understand the complexities of social organisation, community dynamics and patterns of power and politics. While generally conceptualised as the ability of a system/community to respond to, cope with and recover from a particular hazard, communities in Ōtautahi Christchurch have needed to be resilient for an extended period of time to respond to multiple (natural and human-induced) hazards. We explore how community resilience has been operationalised, resisted and re-worked in the recovery from the Canterbury earthquake sequence. We explore these themes in the context of an unfolding and compounding landscape of crises. To explore these themes, we seek to both reconceptualise and provide a critical discussion of the overly popular concept of community resilience.