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ABSTRACT
When disasters isolate communities from external support, their members must turn to each other for mutual assistance. This study explores (1) resource management, (2) information sharing, and (3) community leadership and civic participation as dimensions of peer-to-peer sharing for more efficient distribution of local resources under “islanded” conditions. Interviews with members and leaders of three neighborhood-scale communities in Washington state revealed concerns about household preparedness and stockpiling of resources, but also the potential to lever individuals’ community knowledge, social networks, and willingness to participate. Future interventions might include enhancing place-based social infrastructure for resource and information sharing; online local databases and applications that normally maintain privacy but “unlock” important household information for community use in emergencies; and programs that help individuals access and adopt leadership and participation roles. Satisfying these requirements for successful disaster prepared ness also aligns with the goals of everyday community-building and strengthening of collective capacity.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank their community research partners who contributed their time and knowledge in interviews, and Dr. Katherine Idziorek, who involved Cristina Cano-Calhoun in focus group interviews with some of our informants and introduced her to individual interviewees, and whose doctoral research on “Social Networks and Disaster Preparedness at the Community Level: The Role of Social Ties and Social Infrastructure in Connecting People with Essential Resources” provided an essential foundation for this study. We are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their rigorous comments and guidance in improving the initial manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. With the exception of values otherwise noted, data for Laurelhurst/Sandpoint and South Park are from the 2013–2017 American Communities Survey and data for Westport are from the 2019 American Community Survey.
2. With the exception of values otherwise noted, Census data for Laurelhurst are only available for Laurelhurst and Sandpoint combined tracts.
3. Estimated by Idziorek et al. (Citation2021).
4. See previous note.
5. For Seattle, estimated with Google Earth measurement tool from Puget Sound Regional Catastrophic Grant Program (2019–2022) map and data for population islands; for Westport, estimated from area of 98595 and 98547 zip codes (United States Zip Codes.org, Citationn.d.) and Ocosta School District Boundary Maps and census data (Citation2011). Note that the neighborhood of South Park is split between two “islands” across a highway. These statistics are for the half of South Park that is coterminous with its own island; the other half is part of a larger island it shares with other neighborhoods.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Cristina Cano-Calhoun
Cristina Cano-Calhoun is a graduate of the Masters of Urban Planning program at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the Bachelors of Arts in Sociology and Population Statistics major at University of Texas, Austin. She has led ethnographic and place-based studies investigating community perspectives on pre- and post-disaster resilience and communication—particularly regarding information and knowledge sharing—as well as the community health outcomes of environmental knowledge-based youth empowerment. Cristina is the former Research Coordinator for UW’s THINK lab (directed by Dr. Cynthia Chen), in which capacity she contributed to the National Science Foundation-funded LEAP-HI project on Re-Engineering for Adaptable Lives and Businesses (NSF Award #2053373). Cristina is currently an educator at the Seattle Art Museum where she works to improve access to community-based learning opportunities in both urban and rural settings.
Daniel B. Abramson
Daniel Benjamin Abramson is an associate professor of urban design and planning at the University of Washington, Seattle. His research focuses on cultural and spatial aspects of community engagement and participatory processes in planning adaptation to environmental and socio-technological change, including hazard mitigation, post-disaster recovery, and the maintenance of resilience in systems facing stresses of urbanization. His work on these topics spans urban and rural settings in the Pacific Northwest, Japan, and China; involves direct partnerships with community organizations, local governments, Tribes, and state and federal agencies; and been published in Journal of the American Planning Association, Urban Studies, Cities, Journal of Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, Natural Hazards, and International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, among other outlets.
Cynthia Chen
Cynthia Chen is a professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington (Seattle). She is an internationally renowned scholar in transportation science and directs the THINK (Transportation-Human Interaction and Network Knowledge) lab at the UW. THINK lab’s research activities center on unpacking complexities across scales, from micro-level individual mobility behaviors, to meso-scale interactions formed as the result of individual behaviors (e.g., peer-to-peer sharing at the community level), to macro-level system behaviors that propagate through a single network or multiple networks. Cynthia has published numerous peer-reviewed publications in leading journals in transportation and systems engineering including Transportation Research Part A-F as well as interdisciplinary journals such as PNAS. Her research has been supported by federal agencies (NSF, NIH, APAR-E, NIST, USDOT, and FHWA), state and regional agencies as well as private industry.