“Unfinished intentions”: a photovoice study of community resilience and risk in historically disinvested urban neighborhoods

Despite the increasing complexity of challenges facing historically disinvested urban neighborhoods, few studies have employed the photovoice methodology to examine sources of community resilience and risk in marginalized communities beyond natural hazards or indigenous contexts. This study uses a community-based participatory research (CBPR) design to investigate sources of community risk and resilience in four Indianapolis Eastside neighborhoods selected based on convergent indicators of social vulnerability drawn from the CDC Social Vulnerability Index. Four civically and artistically engaged resident participants documented sources of community risk and resilience through photography and semi-structured interviews, generating visual and narrative data from 70 distinct photographic sites. A hybrid inductive and deductive thematic analysis, guided by Patel’s (2022) elements of community resilience, was applied to the visual and narrative corpus. The analysis produced 126 unique site, code, and theme combinations spanning five prominent elements: resources, local knowledge, community networks and relationships, economic investment, and government and leadership. All five elements appeared under both risk and resilience codes, demonstrating their capacity to capture the dual nature of community conditions as sources of both strength and vulnerability. Resilience-coded artifacts were most frequently associated with resources and local knowledge, while risk-coded artifacts concentrated on economic investment, governance, and leadership. Exhibition attendee contributions, collected through an interactive Resilience Hub installation, corroborated participant findings. Policy recommendations grounded in participant narratives advocate for the repurposing of vacant properties, investment in cultural preservation, protection of non-commercial gathering spaces, support for local business ecosystems, and community-oriented and just design standards. These findings underscore the value of participatory methodologies for generating locally grounded evidence to inform resilience-building interventions in socially vulnerable communities.