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

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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.