Islands of Memory and Resilience: The Importance of Social Memory in The Construction of Resilience

Abstract

When the emphasis in the definition of resilience shifts towards administrative and institutional continuity policies, the resilience practices created by social dynamics become invisible. However, the continuity of communities in the social space they produce enables both the development of practices in crisis and disaster management and the empowerment of communities by taking part in decisionmaking mechanisms in the space where they are located. While the article discusses the development of social resilience practices through the interaction of social memory with space, it relates the weakening of resilience with lack of spatial continuity and gaps in memory through the example of the 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquake. For resilience to become a functioning system, incorporating the demands of communities and the knowledge and coping mechanisms already produced by them to the planning would, at the same time, reduce the hierarchies between public and local memory