Community Resilience + Map!
Communities are resilient through shared history and experiences. Through time, communities build structures and symbols, where they find strength together as one larger entity. People within it lean on each other for support, hence building one another up.
The difference between community resilience and personal resilience is that in a community, one has to take note of others and their differences. Much more space for acceptance and tolerance is needed, and there is an external give and take whereby we have to really look outside ourselves and realise that there are other people in the equation, then finally accept it as one bigger entity. In this sense, perhaps that is how they might be similar. While personal resilience is about looking at the self as one system, community resilience is about looking at the community as one system — just that there are more elements to it.
An example of community projects that reflect this is the idea of a communiy garden. Each person plants what they want, but as time passes, they help observe and take care of one another’s plants, share ideas and harvest, eventually becoming a system that is deeply woven together.
Since a community is a group of people existing together through some sort of shared space (physical, virtual or otherwise), there are bound to be some shared experiences, events, or places. These might be experienced or perceived differently within each individual, but there is some sort of shared medium. Though this map, I explore the different places around me, and recorded the sounds I heard inside. Each 10 to 20 second sound clip shows the different languages, cultures and atmosphere each place has — even if they seem to serve a similar function. From old to new, to places rooted in different cultures, the sounds reflect the different sub-communities that visit these places, and show how each diverse group seems to have its own place in the larger community.
