Keywords in planning: what do we mean by ‘community resilience’?

In this paper, we critically explore the combination of a dynamic, multilayered understanding of community with an open-ended, ‘emergent’ understanding of resilience, and highlight the relevance for planners. We argue prevailing planning policies and practices on community resilience tend to work with rather simplistic, one-dimensional understandings of both ‘community’ and ‘resilience’. The multiple layers of meaning that are embedded in the word community are ignored when it is treated as an add-on intended to give underlying ideas about resilience planning greater public appeal. Apart and together the concepts of community and resilience bring into play a host of tensions between, for example, continuity and change, resistance and adaptation, inclusion and exclusion. This paper offers a framework for ensuring that these important considerations are openly negotiated within transparent normative frameworks of planning policy and practice.