Ready or Not: Assessing Social Capital for Urban Resilience in the US

Abstract

Urban areas in the United States are acutely at risk of an array of natural disasters that will become more frequent as climate change intensifies. Urban resilience is a multi-faceted concept that cities have adopted to prepare and respond to disasters, allowing them to quickly ‘bounce back’ from the shocks and adaptively innovate to prevent future disruptions. Social capital is a concept that focuses on the intangible value of strong, connected, and trustworthy networks that when activated, accelerates a community’s response and recovery to disruptive events.

This research seeks to enhance the understanding of social capital and urban resilience in the US context by examining small-medium-sized cities and illuminating how they recognize and operationalize their concepts. To do this, a comprehensive literature review was first conducted to explore the theory of social capital and urban resilience. This led to the development of an analytical framework that was applied to four US cities by conducting semi-structured interviews. The findings from the case studies revealed that cities typically do recognize and operationalize the concepts of social capital. However, they also encountered challenges related to augmenting social capital, primarily due to conceptual overlaps and contextual factors. Based on these insights, an assessment tool was drafted integrating empirical findings from the case study analysis with theoretical underpinnings through empirical confrontation.