Place Systems and Social Resilience: A Framework for Understanding Place in Social Adaptation, Resilience, and Transformation

Abstract

This article proposes a three-part framework for accounting for the physical and social components of place as a system in community adaptation to crisis. While ideas of place have been incorporated into research on social and community resilience and adaptation, the existing work tends to focus on sense of place or place attachment. Generally, it does not account for the roles of place character or infrastructure. This article develops a novel three-part framework—incarnate, discarnate, and chimerical place—to provide a richer description of how place acts a system to inform social adaptation to crises, and specifically how it informs community resilience or transformation. This framework is demonstrated through case studies of two forest-dependent communities in British Columbia, Canada, adapting to local mill closures.

Keywords:

• community resilience
• natural resources–environmental sociology
• place
• resource-dependent communities
• social–ecological systems
• social resilience

Acknowledgments

I thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editors, as well as John R. Parkins, Naomi Krogman, Theresa Garvin, Kathleen Dietrich, Holland Gidney, Nadine Marshall, and Resilience 2011 attendees for their helpful comments at different stages of this research.

Notes

Development path describes a social system (e.g, a community) following a relatively linear process of historical social or economic development that may perpetuate (resilience) or diverge (transformation) as part of, or in response to, change.

Inspiration for developing this three-part place system came from synthesizing elements of Gaventa's (1980, 2005, 2006) power framework with Cruikshank's (2005) study of social interpretations of glacial landscapes.

A more detailed methodological description appears in Lyon (2011, 76–86; see also Lyon and Parkins 2013).

Recent change from a compulsory to a voluntary format for the 2011 Census of Canada also raise doubts about data reliability from more recent censuses (Ramp and Harrison 2012; Cohen and Hébert 2010; Thompson 2010).

As in Youbou, Davis (1993) found that these types of support might be negatively characterized and resented as “make-work.” However, unlike Davis's study, the JOP in Fort St. James appeared to be positively viewed.

At the time of the research the author was affiliated with the University of Alberta, Canada. The author is now affiliated with the University of Dundee, Scotland.