Place Systems and Social Resilience: A Framework for Understanding Place in Social Adaptation, Resilience, and Transformation

Abstract

This article proposes a three-part framework for accounting for the physical and social components of place as a system in community adaptation to crisis. While ideas of place have been incorporated into research on social and community resilience and adaptation, the existing work tends to focus on sense of place or place attachment. Generally, it does not account for the roles of place character or infrastructure. This article develops a novel three-part framework—incarnate, discarnate, and chimerical place—to provide a richer description of how place acts a system to inform social adaptation to crises, and specifically how it informs community resilience or transformation. This framework is demonstrated through case studies of two forest-dependent communities in British Columbia, Canada, adapting to local mill closures.