Article | Open Access
Resilience as Community Capacity in a City Under Existential Threat: The Case of Slavutych, Ukraine
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Abstract: Community resilience helps cities recover from disasters. We understand community resilience as the capacity of residents to practice community in flexible ways that preserve identities, while adapting to post‐disaster realities. This capacity can depend on many factors. Our article explores how practices to share and ritualize memory may contribute to a local self‐understanding of resilient agency, through the case of Slavutych, Ukraine. We trace Slavutych’s self‐understanding as heroic from the closure of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 2000 to the blockade and partial Russian occupation in Spring 2022, drawing on semi‐structured interviews, a survey, and observations. We argue that resilience may, as in the case of Slavutych, draw on collective memory‐making, which enhances a sense of place and shapes territorial identity through notions of endurance, practices of care, and heroic solidarity.
Keywords: Chornobyl; collective memory; disaster; resilience; sense of place; Slavutych; Ukraine; war
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Issue:
Vol 11 (2026): Urban Futures in Times of Disruption (In Progress)
© Olena Kononenko, Talja Blokland, Olena Dronova. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.