Bottom-Up Urban Resilience

About

Bottom-Up Urban Resilience: Community Networks in Infrastructure Governance

This project aims to understand how community networks influence the provision and governance of infrastructure and how this shapes urban resilience. Resilient infrastructure is critical to safeguarding communities against the increasing frequency, intensity and complexity of shocks faced by Australian cities, such as flooding, extreme heat and rising inequality. Likewise, community resilience is increasingly important in responding to these threats and recovering from disasters, and community engagement is vital to the delivery of resilient infrastructure services.

This project investigates the underdeveloped area of research at the interface between community and infrastructure resilience. This gap is contributing to uneven resilience outcomes within and between cities, and results in missed opportunities to improve urban resilience. The project aims to bridge the gap in research, practice and policy to better support the delivery of resilient infrastructure services and foster community resilience. By understanding how community networks function and interact with government processes, we will gain insight into how these networks are also responding to increasing disaster risk and adapting to changing and uncertain environments.

Working with community networks in Melbourne and Geelong, the project will co-design practical and theoretically grounded models of effective engagement between community networks and infrastructure governance to improve urban resilience. This research will contribute new knowledge in theories of urban resilience, methods for community-based research and the practice of community planning.

The expected outcomes are a critical framework and typology for community-infrastructure engagement that will support communities and decision-makers in creating conditions for effective engagement to improve resilience. The ultimate benefit of this research is for cities to be better prepared for and able to recover from increasingly frequent, intense and inter-connected shocks and stresses, including climate change and pandemics.