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Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery. 2012. Daniel P. Aldrich. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 232 pages.
Social capital can be defined in many ways, for example, as the information and resources that are accessible to people as a consequence of the connections that form their social networks. In Building Resilience, Daniel Aldrich examines the role social capital has played in communities struggling to recover after a natural disaster. He focuses on resilience, which includes personal and communal well-being, organizational and institutional restoration, resumption of services and productivity, restoring the integrity of the infrastructure, and resuming services provided for public safety and governance.
Communities with greater resilience are better prepared to respond and recover after a disaster, and this resilience is associated with levels of social capital. By examining the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, the Kobe (Japan) earthquake of 1995, the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, and finally, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Aldrich concludes that "higher levels of social capital ... serve as the core...