New directions for resilience research: The significance of volume and verticality

Volume and verticality are concepts that have become increasingly important in disciplines such as human, political and cultural geography. In contrast, they have received little (explicit) attention in resilience research. Building on the idea that resilience is a multi-systemic process, this article directly engages with volume and verticality as a novel multi-systemic approach to resilience and it analyses height-depth dynamics through a focus on the underground. It makes two important and original contributions to resilience scholarship. First, it demonstrates that volume and verticality offer a more holistic and 3D way of thinking about some of the shocks and stressors that individuals and communities face – and how they deal with them. Second, the article uses volume and verticality to complexify some of the critical discussions about resilience and power. It maintains that giving attention to volume and verticality illuminates neglected expressions of power, and it explores this using the three key concepts of scale, resistance and agency. This is a mainly conceptual piece of work that further develops its arguments by applying the lenses of volume and verticality to three case studies – the gold mining settlement of La Rinconada in Peru, ‘basement tenants’ in Beijing, China, and a community of homeless people living underground in Bucharest, Romania.