Translocal networking as a cornerstone for community resilience: Activities by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR)

Research on community resilience has focused strongly on the local features of communities backing resilient behaviour. However, the argument of the paper is that the relationship building of communities beyond the locality represents a significant aspect of community resilience. The aim of this paper is to extend the notion of community resilience by highlighting that in today’s world locality is characterised by connectivity. Communities organized on various levels are considered better equipped to deal e.g. with natural disasters and therefore more resilient. Translocal social resilience approaches mostly focus on migration. Translocal social networks and capacities can be found in migrant communities, but also in those communities that have mobilized into networks beyond their locality around livelihood issues. This translocal community resilience as an emerging concept can learn from earlier studies on transnational urbanism by including aspects of horizontal learning, peer-to-peer support and mobilization to collectively address issues of injustice. The paper refers to findings about the networking of urban poor communities (Herrle, Ley and Fokdal, 2015) and an expert group workshop organized at University of Stuttgart "Collective action and resilience in emerging city regions" (April 2017). Case studies on translocal and transnational community networks in Asia related to the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) will serve as illustrations.