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Resilience has become a dominant disaster governance discourse. It has been criticised for insufficiently addressing systemic vulnerabilities while urging the vulnerable to self-organise. The urban resilience discourse involves a particular disconnect: it evokes 'robustness' and unaffectedness at the city scale on the one hand, and self-organisation of disaster-affected people and neighbourhoods on the other. This paper explains and illustrates the dual discourse through a case study on the reconstruction of informal and low-income settlements in the aftermath of the fire in Valparaíso, Chile, in 2014, focusing on the communication contents of two non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These NGOs deployed the discourse differently, yet both called for affected neighbourhoods to build a more robust city through self-organisation, and both suggested their work as the missing link between self-organisation and robustness. A danger in deploying the dual discourse is that it requires people who live in informal and low-income settlements to earn their right to the robust city through 'better' self-organisation based on fragmented visions.

Communities are powerful and necessary agents for defining and pursuing their health, but outside organizations often adopt community health promotion approaches that are patronizing and top-down. Conversely, bottom-up approaches that build on and mobilize community health assets are often critiqued for tasking the most vulnerable and marginalized communities to use their own limited resources without real opportunities for change. Taking into consideration these community health promotion shortcomings, this article asks how communities may be most effectively and appropriately supported in pursuing their health. This article reviews how community health is understood, moving from negative to positive conceptualizations; how it is determined, moving from a risk-factor orientation to social determination; and how it is promoted, moving from top-down to bottom-up approaches. Building on these understandings, we offer the concept of ‘resourcefulness’ as an approach to strengthen positive health for communities, and we discuss how it engages with three interrelated tensions in community health promotion: resources and sustainability, interdependence and autonomy, and community diversity and inclusion. We make practical suggestions for outside organizations to apply resourcefulness as a process-based, place-based, and relational approach to community health promotion, arguing that resourcefulness can forge new pathways to sustainable and self-sustaining community positive health.

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