ABSTRACT
In the context of population decline, property abandonment, and shrinking tax base, forming a land bank can be part of a process that reorients governmental and civil society efforts towards addressing the needs of current inhabitants and taking care of problematic housing infrastructure. This chapter explores the challenges of reorganizing latent governmental, legal, political, philanthropic, and private capacities to build resilience by examining land bank formation in Muncie, Indiana. This chapter connects the concept of resilience to key concepts in contemporary social science – civic capacity, and actor-network theory. In doing so it explores whether surplus or new material resources are necessary to produce a resilient system for addressing abandoned property or if reorganizing existent capacities is sufficient.
