The Rise of Prepping in New York City: Community Resilience and COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic’s brutal impact on New York City has laid bare the social inequalities and injustices of living in a global capital. To better understand urban prepping as a process for helping communities to plan and respond to disaster, this analysis draws on Faulkner, Brown, and Quinn’s (2018) framework of five capacities for community resilience: place attachment; leadership; knowledge and learning; community networks; and community cohesion and efficacy. Given the New York City’s Prepper’s Network mission to acquire preparedness skills, knowledge and learning were core principals of the group it was found that community cohesion was reinforced throughout preparedness training as group members learned to develop their individual skills and to rely on one another. This research also points to the need to develop disaster management approaches that can expand the traditional “command and control” models while making space for local knowledge and resources only works to increase community resilience.