UNDERSTANDING COMMUNITY RESILIENCE A HUMAN AND PHYSICAL FRAMEWORK

Abstract

This paper develops and implements a new framework for assessing community resilience in the face of natural disaster, specifically hurricanes. It combines a human and physical approach to understanding resilience using a number of human resilience indicators and a performance-based community event tree . The framework is applied to two communities affected by Hurricane Sandy in the New York Harbor area: Red Hook in Brooklyn, New York and Union Beach in Monmouth County, New Jersey. The validity of the framework is tested by comparing the predicted community response according to the calculated resilience value for both communities according to predisaster and disaster-specific information with data on the observed resilience in each. The results and further research into the two communities demonstrate the surprisingly positive role that the process of gentrification can play in developing community resilience as well as the importance of resource equity in producing successful disaster recovery.