Resilience as a function of equitable access to services and essentials - integrating infrastructure and community resilience approaches

Abstract

Despite extensive discussion surrounding community resilience, operationalizing the concept remains challenging. The dominant approaches for assessing resilience focus on either evaluating community characteristics or infrastructure functionality. While both are useful, they have several limitations to their ability to provide actionable insight for community resilience. More importantly, the current conceptualizations do not consider people’s access to services and essentials or how that access is impaired by hazards. We argue that people need access to services such as food, education, healthcare, and cultural amenities, in addition to water, power, sanitation, and communications, to get back some semblance of normal life. Providing equitable access to these types of services and quickly restoring that access following a disruption is paramount to community resilience. We present a framework for community resilience and a data-driven methodology that could be used to enhance community resilience through equitable access to amenities.