‘Know your neighbours’: disaster resilience and the normative practices of neighbouring in an urban context

Abstract

As part of community resilience policy, urban dwellers are advised to get to ‘know their neighbours’ so that they are more likely to turn to them in an emergency. But the idea that neighbours might function as resources for disaster preparedness fails to take account of the fact that neighbour relations are highly diverse and occasionally problematic. Drawing on residents' experiences of the 2011 floods in south-east Queensland, Australia, this paper examines how neighbouring practices and relationships prior to a disaster influence the nature and extent of support from neighbours when disaster strikes. It shows that emergency assistance can map onto existing neighbour relations, such that closer neighbour relations foster frequent and more reliable forms of help. However, the seriousness of the disaster event may be such that residents are aware of their responsibilities to one another as neighbours even if relations are relatively poor or absent. The paper yields important insights for disaster policy and practice in suggesting that community resilience should be embedded within local social practices such as neighbouring, but that neighbouring itself cannot be engineered into existence.