Resilience became a must in many policy agenda, but still lacks clear guidelines for its implementation and a proper system of monitoring its performance. In relation to disaster resilience, there are many frameworks and metrics for assessing and measuring urban resilience, but some context dependent variables still discuss their usefulness and replicability.

This paper draws a set of indicators about social capacities and behaviours, mostly linked to the influence played by city structure and related to the context-dependent administration mechanisms. These factors enhance the understanding of which are the key determinants guiding the recovery of community life after a disaster. This set of factors are compared before and after the disaster happened in two central Italy selected case studies: the small urban centers of Fermo and Rieti

For each case-study we collected and to map urban density, population characteristics, , the number and type of the recent past disaster experiences, the social and physical networks, the number and type of common shared places and common goods among other community-related indicators.

This research results highlight that in central Italy cases the availability of economic resources for reconstruction for them self could not lead toward community sustainability and wellbeing. Monitoring the soft variables related to urban resilience and its implementation is key to better understand and describe policy performance. Furthermore, because of the context dependency of the soft variables, this paper contributes to the call for framing local, or regional, urban resilience observatories.