Community Resilience When Disaster Strikes: Security and Community Health in UK Flood Zones
Reviewed by Lidia Cano Pecharroman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
How can communities come back after they are hit by floods?
Community Resilience When Disaster Strikes: Security and Community Health in UK Flood Zones by Sonny S. Patel, Springer, 2020, 200 pp.
This book gives the reader a chance to reflect on the multiple dimensions of community resilience in response to flooding. The book offers a clear message: community flood resilience cannot be oversimplified, and even though we can get closer to a more systematic understanding of it, local idiosyncrasies will always be key when planning. Although written from an academic angle the book is recommended for students, researchers and practitioners alike. Having stand-alone chapters, it can be used as a go-to manual to learn about one of the topics covered without having to follow a particular order. The chapters are structured as research papers containing a background literature review and detailed methods sections, followed by the results and discussion. This format makes the book particularly useful for students interested in conducting research in this field and who are just getting started. Exploring community resilience, the book identifies nine core elements that structure the research and findings across the book. These elements are local knowledge, community networks and relationships, communication, health, governance and leadership, resources, economic investment, preparedness and mental outlook. These overarching themes allow for the knowledge contained in a chapter to be put in conversation with the findings of others. Read in its entirety, the book provides a multidimensional overview of what the field knows so far about community resilience to flooding and where are the gaps to be filled. The book is the result of an extensive literature review that is further informed by qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data collected on the ground. Even though the field research is focused on the United Kingdom, readers who are looking to understand flood and community resilience beyond the United Kingdom should not be discouraged. The book sustains a constant dialogue between the existing resilience literature and community knowledge on the ground that provides valuable insights into risk perception, governance and lessons learned. These lessons, although not always transferable, will be useful when thinking about community resilience in other geographies. Overall, the book provides a comprehensive review of the topic that will serve both as a theoretical reference and as a basis for future empirical evidence production in the field.
