Public Spaces for Community Resilience: Thinking beyond the Dichotomies of Public and Private as well as Exterior and Interior

This paper focuses on public spaces for community resilience in their ‘response-related abilities’ and which can be improved. Comparative studies of communities, places, and/or disasters after the unforeseen impactful events are indicators to quantify the level of resilience. Within the broad scope of literature, in this line, ‘community networks’, ‘people-place connections’, and ‘community infrastructure’ are consequentially attributes that come out strongly in studying the resilience of community during change events. In other words, people, and spaces, in their social and physical interconnectivity, contribute to the level of community resilience. In this context, the aim of this paper is to take a closer look into the relation between community resilience and public spaces and specify those public spaces which enhance resilience by means of its design. Based upon reviewing literature and identifying similarities in reasoning community resilience as well as adherence in the discussed spaces as support for community resilience, these public spaces have been specified and some examples from Rotterdam are given to make an accurate image of them.