"Before the Flood": Interweaving situated performance and flood narratives for resilience building in hard-to-reach urban flood risk communities.

This research project involves a partnership between two networks from the 2010/11 AHRC ‘Researching Environmental change’ programme. The ‘Performance Footprint’ network brings expertise in using site-specific performance to promote awareness of environmental change in diverse settings. The ‘Living Flood Histories’ network has explored how situated flood narrative and memorialisation practices can bring new insights in how to engage public groups, at changing flood risk. This proposed 12 month project responds to an invitation from the Environment Agency (EA) to explore how situated performance and flood narratives might be used to engage ‘hard to reach’ urban floodplain groups, at risk from flooding but without recent flood experience. Such groups may be disconnected in both physical and human terms (e.g. divided by urban planning, lacking in community cohesion), proving unresponsive to recent policy initiatives emphasising the importance of community-led adaptation planning in dealing with flood risk. This project aims to stimulate awareness of these issues, and encourage local resilience-building, by researching and facilitating two inter-related, site-specific performance events, in direct collaboration with local volunteers. The chosen sites in Bristol (Eastville) and Bradford (Shipley) have been identified by the EA, and feature heavily canalised watercourses partly hidden from public view.

The research process will begin by reviewing the findings of the contributing research networks, and considering their application in the project context. How might situated narratives and performances best be framed to encourage local engagement with flood risk? Can the ‘after the flood’ memorialisation practices of other communities be used as a creative means to inform ‘before the flood’ resilience-building in the chosen site contexts? Can creative participation be employed as a means for: developing and enhancing ‘a watery sense of place’; exploring uncertainty around future climate scenarios; understanding issues around ‘distributed responsibility’ for flood risk response. Local engagement strategies will be developed in collaboration with facilitation experts. Volunteer participants will be involved in a project development period, with regular creative workshops and discussions extrapolating the research concerns. A key objective will be to use the process of working towards creative outcomes to help generate a context in which expert and local knowledges are equally valued. Dialogues will be facilitated between local participants, flood scientists and other experts, EA and local council representatives.

The development period will lead towards participatory public performance events, presented in the context of festive community gatherings (e.g. street parties). A model of ‘distributed performance’ will be pioneered, involving a range of interconnected presentations offered by various groups and individuals in different microsites within the floodplain vicinity. This will maximise potential for local involvement, and emphasise the ecological theme of connectivity between people and places. Responses to these events among residents will be sought, and the outcomes of the two projects cross-referred, in order to develop research findings. Project outcomes will be captured and disseminated through: a guidance/action pack for potential future users; interdisciplinary research articles and presentations; documentation presented on collaborating networks’ websites. The research results will be of interest to a wide range of disciplines and professions: researchers in theatre/performance studies, physical and cultural geography, social history; professionals in flood risk management (EA, local authorities); social engagement professionals. Attention will be given to how the research can generate sustainable follow-through in the case study settings, and how the research outcomes are cascaded to other urban flood risk groups.

This interdisciplinary, interprofessional project will contribute to knowledge enhancement in key official organisations in flood risk management. The national Environment Agency (EA) is a key partner in its inception and development. The project responds directly to a challenge from the EA’s Community and Stakeholder Relations Manager, to develop innovative ways of engaging ‘hard to reach’ urban groups with flood risk issues. National and regional EA officers have advised on identifying sites for this pilot project, and will remain involved in an advisory capacity. The EA will benefit directly from the project’s research findings, through its development of innovative creative approaches for flood-risk engagement, and its testing of appropriate means of facilitation for such engagement methods. Other partners in distributed flood risk management, such as Local Authorities, parish councils, and the National Flood Forum (a self-help organisation for flood-affected communities) will also benefit from these findings. The city councils in Bristol and Bradford will be engaged as key stakeholders in the project: Bradford Council has already identified potential synergies with the EU-wide Flood Resilient Cities programme (in which Bradford is the main UK partner city).

Other beneficiaries include key collaborators engaged in the two case study areas. In Bristol, the community catalyst organisation Streets Alive will develop and facilitate involvement in the project among local residents and community groups, and will benefit from an enhanced understanding of how creative research processes can complement their established methods for delivery of community-generated street parties and events. Similarly, the arts facilitation organisation Rio Associates will benefit from its own part in delivering this multi-agency performance research project. In Bradford, the arts facilitation role will be played by Red Ladder Theatre Company, whose ongoing interests in creative engagement around environmental and climate change issues will be further enhanced through interprofessional involvement with academic researchers. The Airedale Waterways Partnership (a consortium of key stakeholders in the area’s blue / green infrastructure) will benefit from enhanced public engagement with issues around water in the landscape, and through Canal Connections will help deliver the community facilitation side of the Shipley case study (Streets Alive will also advise, ensuring consistency across the two projects, and further building their national capacity).

Other stakeholders in these areas will also be identified early in the research process and invited to advise and participate in the development of the case study projects. These include river advocacy groups (Aire Rivers Trust, Free the Frome), the Royal Society of Arts (developing a parallel ‘Connected Communities’ project in the Eastville area), church groups, environmental groups, neighbourhood groups, etc. Crucially, local residents in both case study areas will be invited to participate as volunteer facilitators and performers, thereby benefiting from: the dialogue between expert and local knowledges that the project will encourage; the opportunity to develop creative presentation skills as a means of responding to and enhancing their own ‘sense of place’ in these sites of changing flood risk. It is anticipated that the process of connecting up groups and individuals in these areas, by engaging them in collaborative creative research, will also build capacity for future resilience planning and flood awareness measures. Furthermore, the cross-referenced findings of the twin case study projects will lead to the development and dissemination of guidelines / working principles, enabling other groups and agencies to apply the methods developed in creating similar site-specific performance projects in other flood-risk localities. The potential future impacts of this research are therefore extensive.