Community Resilience Engineering: Reflections and Preliminary Contributions

An important challenge for human societies is that of mastering the complexity of Community Resilience, namely “the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations”. The above concise definition puts the accent on an important requirement: a community’s ability to make use in an intelligent way of the available resources, both institutional and spontaneous, in order to match the complex evolution of the “significant multi-hazard threats characterizing a crisis”. Failing to address such requirement exposes a community to extensive failures that are known to exacerbate the consequences of natural and human-induced crises. As a consequence, we experience today an urgent need to respond to the challenges of community resilience engineering. This problem, some reflections, and preliminary prototypical contributions constitute the topics of the present article.