Resilience in the Post-Welfare Inner City: Voluntary Sector Geographies in London, Los Angeles and Sydney

Resilience has become one of the first fully-fledged academic and political buzzwords of the twenty-first century. Within this context, Geoffrey DeVerteuil proposes a more critically-engaged and conceptually-robust version, applying it to the conspicuous but now residual clusters of voluntary sector organizations deemed ‘service hubs’. The process of resilience is compared across ten service hubs in three complex but different global inner city-regions: London, Los Angeles and Sydney in response to the threat of gentrification-induced displacement. He shows that resilience can be about holding on to previous gains but also about holding out for transformation. The book is the first to move beyond theoretical books on ‘resilience’ and offer a combined conceptual and empirical approach that will interest urban geographers, social planners and researchers of the voluntary sector.