Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence - Final Report

While the sources and forms of social and political violence have been extensively examined, the ways ordinary people along with their neighbors and officials cope with chronic urban violence have earned far less attention. This eight-case study of cities suffering from a history of violence explores this latter phenomenon, which we call resilience. We define resilience as those acts intended to restore or create effectively functioning community-level activities, institutions, and spaces in which the perpetrators of violence are marginalized and perhaps even eliminated.
This report identifies the sets of conditions and practices that enhance an individual or a community’s capacity to act independently of armed actors. We specify the types of horizontal (e.g., intra-community, or neighborhood-to-neighborhood) and vertical (e.g., state-community) relationships that have been used to sustain this relative autonomy. Violence and responses to it are situated in physical space, and we look for the spatial correlates of resilience, seeking to determine whether and how physical conditions in a neighborhood will affect the nature, degrees, and likelihood of resilience.