Social Archetypes and Social Resilience: Framework and Methodology

Urban communities today face a growing number of disruptions, from extreme weather events to demographic shifts and digital transformations. To build resilient societies, it is crucial to understand how different social groups anticipate, respond to, and recover from such disruptions.

A recent working paper by researchers from the Future Resilient Systems (FRS) programme at the Singapore-ETH Centre introduces a framework for assessing social resilience through the lens of social archetypes—groups of individuals with shared perceptions and capacities within a heterogeneous population. Unlike traditional socio-demographic analyses, this approach focuses on rather stable individual traits to assess the social resilience of different groups in society.

Highlights:

• Social resilience of societal groups depends on a combination of individual capacities and perceptions, as well as on environmental contexts.
• A five-step methodology is proposed to identify social archetypes empirically. Social archetypes share capacities and perceptions.
• Social archetypes offer a structured way to assess social groups’ social resilience performance in normal and disruptive times.
• Policymakers, urban planners, and community leaders can leverage insights from the proposed framework to design tailored interventions to strengthen social resilience in increasingly disruptive times.

Photo Credits: Illustrations by Storyset (external page www.storyset.com/people) ; Modified by Michelle Chan Mei Har.