Speaker
Description
Within cities, neighbourhoods engender and reflect health and social inequities, giving rise to vulnerability (e.g., during a pandemic) and inter-generational trauma and poverty for some communities. Neighbourhood settings can expose people to stressors (e.g., safety concerns) and provide resources for surviving and thriving (e.g., food banks and public recreation facilities, respectively), so targeted resilience interventions can improve wellbeing (e.g., chronic disease prevention, joy) for at-risk communities. There is growing interest in fostering community resilience, but a gap remains in how to strengthen engagement of community members in the process of resilience planning at a neighbourhood scale. The Smart Citizens Enabling Resilient Neighbourhoods (SCERN) study aims to create accessible methods and tools for community-engaged resilience planning. A framework for resilience planning was developed that includes a fundamental role for community and a role for exploring, documenting, and sharing resilience contributors through digital participatory mapping. The framework was built on a system of values, including empowerment, community participation, reflexivity, and relationality as well as an annotated bibliography of methods for community-engaged decision-making. The presentation will describe the problem space and the six stages of resilience planning in the framework, including: (1) Pre-Mapping; (2) Participatory Mapping; (3) Pre-Planning; (4) Planning (Bridging); (5) Planning (Problem Solving); and (6) Post-Planning. Results from a participatory mapping pilot study will highlight the role of citizen-generated data in the process. Discussion will focus on how this approach can improve community resilience by working towards community consciousness, empowerment, well-being, and liberation.
Keywords: neighborhood; resilience; planning; participatory mapping; community engagement
