Survey paper: achievements and perspectives of community resilience approaches to societal systems

Abstract

The term resilience has become a buzzword with a multitude of definitions, and several studies have exerted efforts in conceptualizing it. For further academic progress, discussions on community resilience need to shift from conceptualization to operationalization. In this context, I aim to synthesize academic contributions and provide future perspectives of studies on community resilience approaches, focusing on societal systems. First, I demonstrate the general trend of community resilience research, which leads to a general analytical framework for these studies. Next, I present the results of a survey of influential studies based on this framework and discuss recent achievements in community resilience in relation to the following six elements: social, information, competence, economic, spatial, and natural. From the survey results, I suggest two perspectives: (1) the harmonization of gears for resilience and community resilience sub-elements, including equitable resilience, and (2) inactive resident pursuits of roles in community resilience. Finally, I show the potential contributions of regional science to this topic highlighting its strengths in interdisciplinary approaches based on spatial and temporal scales.