Spaces of resilience. Citizen science for community resilience building

The role of citizens and local communities in disaster risk assessment, preparedness and mitigation has always been fundamental, but long obscured in public memory, in media translation and often also in scientific reading of natural disasters.

During recent years, the citizen science approach - which has become very popular -has drawn attention to the need for active involvement of citizens and communities to produce resilient responses to disasters, through inclusive and participatory bottom-up activities.More specifically, it can increase resilience by building the collective and self-efficacy of individuals, organisations, and communities; above all , it can help to recognize and nurture the local social capital, trust and sense of community. In addition, it can make it possible to exploit previous experiences of disaster governance (e.g. through local memories), activating a knowledge transfer process useful for preparing and responding to catastrophes.

Many factors interact on capacity of individuals, communities, and institutions to respond to disasters (e.g., Lindell & Prater, 2002; Paton & Johnston, 2006): the collective and self-efficacy (Paton & Johnston, 2006; Paton et al., 2010); outcome expectancy, action coping, leadership, individual and community empowerment, trust, sense of community, and place attachment (Aldrich & Meyer, 2014; Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche, & Pfefferbaum, 2008); and so on.

These factors interact in a "social space-time" in which the socio-cultural characteristics of contexts , the role played by institutional decision-makers, by regulations, by the times of actions become very important.

Here we present an overview of some case studies carried out in Italy, focused on contexts affected by natural disasters, particularly harmful from a physical and social point of view. These case studies can be useful to highlight factors/conditions that can hinder or encourage forms of community resilience in the response to events.