Reframing Mosque Networks as Urban Resilience Infrastructure in Banda Aceh
Keywords:
Mosque Network, Urban Resilience, Ahern Framework, Evacuation Center, Banda AcehAbstract
Mosques are commonly understood as religious buildings, yet in disaster-prone Muslim cities they also function as social, spatial, and humanitarian infrastructures. This article reframes mosques as urban resilience nodes by applying Ahern’s resilience capacity framework to the context of Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Located in a multi-hazard region exposed to earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and extreme weather, Banda Aceh requires a distributed and socially trusted system of emergency facilities, particularly in dense urban areas where vacant land is limited. Drawing on an integrative literature review and contextual synthesis, this paper examines how mosque networks can contribute to five dimensions of urban resilience: multifunctionality, redundancy and modularization, biological and social diversity, multi-scale networks and capacity, and adaptive planning and design. The discussion argues that mosques have inherent resilience potential because they are spatially distributed, socially embedded, culturally trusted, and often equipped with basic support facilities. However, their actual readiness as evacuation and early recovery facilities depends on measurable factors such as pedestrian accessibility, shelter capacity, water and sanitation, electricity, inclusive access, emergency logistics, and institutional coordination. The article contributes a conceptual framework for mosque-based urban resilience planning and proposes that future disaster preparedness in Banda Aceh should move beyond identifying mosques as temporary shelters toward strengthening them as functional, networked, and adaptive resilience infrastructure.
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