Some scholars suggest that community resilience is an organic concept difficult to consistently define across varying spatiotemporal and sociocultural circumstances. Thus, it may be more productive to consider it as a fluid term that comprises a range of contextual attributes important for the community recovery from hazards and disasters. This more flexible interpretation of community resilience will be discussed in the context of three different locations in the City of Hampton, Virginia, that share a common overarching challenge of coastal flooding but face different neighborhood-level conditions that shape their resilience and adaptation options. Even though all three communities are located within the same low-lying area of Hampton, they have significantly different risk to critical infrastructure, commercial and residential properties, and ecosystem. The results suggest that even though all three locations are in close proximity to each other, each has its own unique strengths and weaknesses that shape their place-based vulnerability with the city-wide and regional implications on resilience in a highly interconnected and interdependent Hampton Roads area.

Anamaria Bukvic is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Virginia Tech. Her research revolves around climate change adaptation, coastal risks, resilience, as well as population displacement and relocation in response to coastal hazards and disasters. Anamaria's early projects evaluate the use of relocation rhetoric in climate change adaptation documents and introduce new decision-support tools to inform relocation planning. More recently, she conducted two post-Hurricane Sandy household surveys on willingness to consider relocation as a response strategy and interviews with stakeholders in Hampton Roads, Virginia, and on the Eastern Shore in Maryland on barriers and opportunities for adaptation. Her current research is focused on older populations living in flood-prone coastal areas, meta-analysis of vulnerability studies, and impacts of migration movement on the community resilience. Anamaria also serves as co-lead of the Coastal@VT interdisciplinary research initiative at Virginia Tech and affiliate faculty in the Global Change Center and the Gerontology Center, also at Virginia Tech.

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