Community Climate Resilience through Folk Pageantry

"Community Climate Resilience through Folk Pageantry" offers a creative, imaginative and interdisciplinary practice-as-research project focusing on community knowledge to deliver a Manchester-focused case study responding directly to its climate action policies and community contexts. The project builds on existing research practices of the PI and Co-Is across intersectional areas of geography, mapping, performance, music, socially-engaged arts practices, and intangible and material heritages. We will work with partners Manchester Climate Change Agency (MCCA), Manchester City Council (MCC), Neighbourhoods North Manchester (Miles Platting & Newton Heath ward), Northern Chamber Orchestra (NCO) and National Trust North Region (NT), with advisory and impact-related support from Manchester Arts and Sustainability Team (MAST) and the EU C-Change Project, Manchester Education Institute (MIE, UoM), and the Black Environment Network (BEN). A Bird in the Hand Theatre's puppet maker and director Alison Duddle is a co-creator.

The issues we will explore are: how a community articulates its perspectives on social justice and equality with regard to climate resilience; how interdisciplinary creativity can be researched and applied to activate community climate resilience; how a community can create, own and embed creative outcomes for resilience; the means to best transfer these methods to policy-makers for wider implementation.

Manchester is a diverse city of 503,00 citizens with over 200 languages spoken. MCC's Forecasting Model projects a population of 661,000 by 2027. Benefits of economic growth are not equally matched by improvements in health outcomes inequalities across the city, with high levels of ill health and early death. Manchester wards have the lowest levels of green infrastructure than other local authorities within Greater Manchester. Its fast-growing population faces increased risk of extreme weather events, from flooding to drought. North Manchester is home to approximately 130,500 residents across 10 wards with high deprivation.Our research will be embedded within the North Manchester ward of Miles Platting & Newton Heath. The ward has approximately 15,000 residents and was once home to workers across varied industries.

MCC declared a Climate Emergency on 10 July 2019, setting the City's zero-carbon target for 2038. Led by MCCA its Zero Carbon Framework outlines an approach to reach the target, yet Manchester's carbon budget will run out in 2025. Manchester Climate Change Framework 2020-25 declares "15 Actions", calling on all residents and organisations in Manchester to "help meet our climate change targets". These actions combine mitigation strategies with adaptation but the methods by which to engage communities and identify barriers to taking up these actions remain undefined. Most residents face barriers to respond to the 15 Actions. We identified a viable Manchester activation of socially engaged arts as an important development for local engagement at very local levels for addressing climate resilience within communities. Subsequently, MCCA and Neighbourhood Wards have invited our research team to evolve an environmental engagement approach with a refreshingly different place-based, creative approach to connect communities with the 15 Actions.

The project develops outputs including: pageant performances in Miles Platting & Newton Heath; documentation, film and performance materials held in an online Open Access website repository; a schools resource licensed performance pack; toolbox for creative methods workshops for policy practitioners and neighbourhood managers; co-authored paper; recommendations report for transferability of methods; a project book.

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Informed section does not require completion for this call.