Abstract
Hurricane Maria left unprecedented impacts on Puerto Rican communities, leaving some without infrastructure services and unable to communicate with family for several months. To understand the forms of community-level resilience that emerged while hard infrastructure systems took time recover, this article (1) abductively explores resilience as an emergent phenomenon of complex adaptive systems; (2) identifies subsequent forms of social capital, local adaptive capacities, and manifestations of quantifiable variables, such as infrastructure performance, in community experiences; and (3) demonstrates a framework to integrate disparate methodologies for resilience assessments via a multiplicity of mappings of space and place. We combine ethnographic and geospatial methods into an interactive GeoApp for analysis using participant-coded narratives and a series of geospatial indicators as a thick map. Thick mapping facilitates quantitative and qualitative data analysis at several scales, while enabling qualitative query of collected narratives. Results highlight local innovation, community bonding and bridging, and nuances in the role of public institutions as emergent elements of resilience. The thick map shows how top-down assessments can be augmented by thick data and how multiple framings can be anchored in the same system or place. These findings are important to inform and integrate community-oriented and technocentric solutions toward resilience-enhancing measures.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 2413-2435 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Annals of the American Association of Geographers |
| Volume | 112 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2022 |
Funding
This article attempts to bring together often disparate analytical approaches and system framings in a dynamic map that illustrates resilience attributes and dynamics in a specific context (e.g., Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico). Specifically, we create an interactive geovisual application that simultaneously represents quantitative and qualitative information, respectively, geospatial indicators and a distributed ethnography. This work stems from a multipronged project supported by the National Science Foundation titled “Enhancing Resilience in Islanded Communities” ( Eric21.org ) with the objective, in part, of developing an integrated and data-driven framework that can assess physical and social interconnections toward enhancing resilience in islanded communities. We describe a method for understanding disaster resilience and provide a platform for which future interdisciplinary outputs (including technical modeling approaches) can be integrated (e.g., hydrological modeling, power network simulations, and spatial ethnographies of subsequent events like earthquakes and pandemics).
Keywords
- complexity, Hurricane Maria, mixed methods, resilience, thick mapping
