Community Resilience: Challenges, Requirements, and an Organizational Model
VINCENZO DE FLORIO
The keynote speech of the workshop will be given byDr. Vincenzo De Florio on community resilience.Vincenzo De Florio is a post-doctoral researcher with the PATS research group of the University of Antwerp and the iMinds research institute.
![](http://serene2014.inf.mit.bme.hu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/vincenzo-de-florio-150x150.png)
Vincenzo De Florio
Abstract. An important challenge for human societies is that of mastering the complexity of Community Resilience, namely “the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to respond to withstand, and recover from adverse situations”. The above concise definition puts the accent on an important requirement: a community’s ability to make use in an intelligent way of the available resources, both institutional and spontaneous, in order to match the complex evolution of the “significant multi-hazard threats” characterizing a crisis so as to achieve “minimum damage to public safety and health, the economy, and national security”. Failing to address such requirement exposes a community to extensive failures that are known to exacerbate the consequences of natural and human-induced crises. As a consequence, we experience today an urgent need to respond to the challenges of community resilience engineering. This problem and a prototypic solution constitute the topics of the present keynote speech. Questions addressed will include: How could we tap into the nearly unlimited sources of “social energy” of our societies? How to foster inter-organizational collaboration? How to avoid the exclusion of spontaneous non-institutional responders (so-called “shadow responders”)? How to model mutualistic relationships between responders of any type? And which forms of organization are best suited to play a role in the emergence of collective intelligent responses to crises? In this speech we will also introduce a model, called Fractal Social Organizations, and conjecture how said model may be considered as a first step towards the engineering of community resilient responses to crises and other social problems.