Resilience, Sustainability and Voluntary Temporary Populations

Dear Colleagues,

Resilience represents one of the key contemporary challenges for local areas, particularly in rural and peripheral locations. Recent research shows that the resilience of places depends on ecological, economic, political, technological and social features specific to the context. The degree of community resilience, however, appears to vary depending on the adaptability of groups, institutions and individuals to prevent, prepare, recover and thrive in the event of hazards, crises and disasters, including COVID-19, as well as “normal” change. Much of the theorizing and research on the resilience and/or sustainability of places has been assumed on the basis of the permanent population and often does not give full recognition to the substantial role of “temporary”, “seasonal” or “mobile” populations, such as seasonal workers, students, second home owners, tourists, and fly-in/fly-out workers. Such temporary populations may be termed as voluntary so as to contrast them from forced migrant populations. Given the holistic nature of the concepts of resilience and sustainability, it is essential that all place-specific actors are recognized in order to identify all relevant vulnerabilities and ensure that communities either become more resilient or maintain the necessary levels of resilience. This has become especially clear as a result of the impacts of COVID-19 and the extent to which many people have been caught “out of place” as a result of their travel or work with substantial implications for the understanding of personal rights, residency, well-being as well as the responsibilities of the place(s) in which they reside and are temporarily located. The need to better understand voluntary temporary populations (VTPs) therefore has substantial implications for personal and place resilience but also how this intersects with sustainability at different geographical scales as well as that of individual businesses and organizations.
While the need to include all stakeholders is acknowledged in theory, much of the resilience and sustainability literatures focuses specifically on “permanent” populations. This marginalizes those VTPs who may be active members of their community and fails to acknowledge the specific problems faced by places that are economically dependent on temporary populations who are resident for reasons of work, residence or play. Given the identified gaps, this Special Issue hopes to stimulate debate through manuscripts on, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Disaster and crisis resilience and VTPs
• COVID-19 and VTPs
• The wellbeing of VTPs during COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions
• The relationships between sustainability and resilience with respect to VTPs
• VTPs and socio-economic change
• Economic resilience and seasonality
• Seasonality and its relationship to the sustainability of places and organizations
• Climate and environmental change and VTPs
• Resilience planning and VTP
• VTP and risk awareness
• Community integration, resilience and VTPs
• What does resilience mean for VTPs?
• Why do VTPs need to be resilient?
• Economic resilience and dependency on seasonal workers
• Governance and recognition of VTPs
• The sustainability of places with substantial VTP populations
• Demographic recognition of VTPs
• VTPs and second homes/multiple dwelling

Prof. Dr. C. Michael Hall
Dr. Bailey Ashton Adie
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• temporary populations, second homes, seasonal workers
• expatriate populations
• tourists
• seasonality
• fly-in/fly-out workers
• resilience
• sustainability, temporary mobilities