"Resilient communities are stories of ambition, courage and stubborn dedication of women and men who believe in the beauty of a better world."

Mapping Resilient Communities is a survey on the Italian and international context aiming at shading light on the industrious and tireless work of public and private institutions, non-profit organizations and informal civic groups that promote ideas, projects and initiatives with a strong connotation of resilience, in its environmental, social and economic terms. The mapping identifies tangible results based on experiences of knowledge transfer, capacity building and capacity development, intended as building something new from the ground up, and promotion of a dynamic and flexible process, built on existing skills and knowledge, involving local actors.
According to UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, resilience refers to the ability of an urban system to retain its structure in response to various environmental shocks and stresses, while adapting and regenerating, and simultaneously promoting a positive and sustainable change. Strengthening resilience means reducing risks, increasing skills and decreasing frailties, improving effective and forward-looking responses, developed according to a process of constructive awareness. Resilience also means dealing with public health, according to an approach that is not detached from urban economy and territorial planning, in relation to unpredictable events - such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which found us dangerously unprepared - that are able to cause distress to our normality.
In the Italian context, resilience also deals with the ability to manage extremely bureaucratized processes, developed through systems of standardized rules and procedures, in a complex and highly unstable political scenario: making resilient innovation and thinking outside the predefined schemes and categories encounters many difficulties and it clashes with backward cultural systems unable to model themselves on ideas that introduce radical changes, not only in terms of results but also in terms of language and methods of expression.
Resilient communities have organizational skills, in the management of people and resources, have resourcefulness, invention and entrepreneurship, they experiment, acting beyond what belongs to established practices, often in unfavourable economic conditions. Their work, made up of daily reflections, of continuous opportunities for dialogue and comparison, of intellectual and creative passion, explains the value of human capital that invests in resilience, beyond the logic of profit, pursuing as main goal only and exclusively the common good. Because resilience deals also with the quality of life of individuals and with the collective well-being.

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