The problem of community resilience in two flooded cities: Dhaka 1998 and Brisbane 2011

This paper critiques the concept of urban community resilience by making a comparison of a flood disaster in two very different cities, Dhaka in Bangladesh and Brisbane in Australia. Community resilience is a concept that has emerged in the social sciences from ecological literature as a way of assessing and measuring the ability of communities to respond to and adapt following a disaster. In the literature the term ‘resilience’ is well defined, but ‘community’ is often presented as unproblematic. The flood recovery in Brisbane was the result of a strong public realm, strong institutions and a relatively low level of social inequality, with local community as a desirable, but not necessary, feature. In Dhaka the presence of strong local community was of little help to residents already living in absolute poverty; it is difficult to be resilient if its measure is decreasing long-term vulnerability. The absence of these city-wide institutions and a strong public realm meant that the poor in Dhaka were isolated; fated to rely on their own meagre resources. In neither case could resilience or the lack of it, be explained by local community. The effects of a trauma such as a flood cannot be understood by making general assumptions about communities as ‘stand alone’ phenomena with essentialised characteristics independent of context in which they are found.