What makes a resilient community? Neighbourhood-level analysis in Sheffield, United Kingdom

Set in 100 neighbourhoods in Sheffield (a city affected by the economic downturn), and working in partnership with Sheffield City Council, this project aimed to identify indicators that support community resilience across different neighbourhoods in the city. Drawing on the work of Magis, neighbourhood resilience was defined as “the existence, development and engagement of local resources by community members to thrive in an environment characterized by change, uncertainty, unpredictability, and surprise”.  

The first stage involved developing a method to identify resilient communities using available neighbourhood-level datasets. Key stressors were socioeconomic deprivation, unemployment and low income. Outcomes (and the respective indicators) were community safety and cohesion (crime rates, antisocial behaviour), health and well-being (life expectancy, premature mortality, mental health admissions) and inclusion (voting, truancy, educational attainment). The analysis ranked the 100 neighbourhoods according to whether their outcomes were better or worse than expected.  

Follow-up fieldwork in four neighbourhoods that were positive outliers (i.e. had better than expected outcomes) found that three had higher levels of socioeconomic stress and one was more affluent with lower levels of stress. More than 50 local stakeholders (including ward councillors, faith leaders, community activists, health professionals and housing and police officers) were interviewed about what made a resilient community. Overall, the project identified three main causes of the variations in resilience between areas:  

• who lives there – individual resources, age profile, capacity to engage, population stability, diversity and difference;  

• the social and physical context – physical environment, facilities and amenities, service provision, active citizenship, media and communications, links to power and influence, housing, and crime and antisocial behaviour; and  

• the nature of community – shared notion of belonging and identity, and inclusive communities.  

This case study illustrates that a good understanding of what makes a resilient neighbourhood can be obtained by combining routinely collected quantitative data with qualitative interviews focused on community strengths. 

Photo by Harrison Qi on Unsplash