Rethinking community hubs: community facilities as critical infrastructure

This article discusses community hubs (CH) - multi-purpose institutions that host social, educational and health services, while building social connectedness and community capacity. Major events such as climate change, wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic are placing new demands on CHs to be emergency refuges, information centres, community kitchens and more. Such events highlight the critical nature of social infrastructure to both disaster responses and long-term community building and resilience. Such events, though, expose new seams of infrastructural and spatial injustice and place strain on insecure institutional arrangements. Infrastructure policy has typically focussed on large-scale systems and networks in defining and resourcing critical infrastructure. We examine some conceptual and policy challenges in rethinking CHs as anchor institutions for addressing vulnerability, building community resilience, and fostering adaptive responses to enable more socially and environmentally just development.

Automated summary

This article discusses the role of community hubs and their importance in major events and disasters, emphasizing the criticality of social infrastructure in community building and resilience. The article highlights the need to rethink the concept and policy challenges of community hubs to achieve more socially and environmentally just development.