What is the potential of creative practice for building community resilience in flood-prone communities in the UK?

Abstract

This paper critically explores the potential of creative practices to support community resilience in relation to flooding, coastal erosion and inundation in the UK. We argue that imaginative ways of thinking, communicating, and working are necessarily required to better engage publics and manage the entangled and far-reaching environmental problems that we face today. The social impacts of intractable challenges like flooding present a conundrum that requires novel approaches to their resolution. We start from the position that creative practices could offer us a fresh and powerful way to confront these impasses. However, the relations, dispositions, geographies and political dynamics involved in socially engaged creative processes remain to be more fully explored. In order to begin this process, the paper unpacks the concept of community resilience as a series of intersecting place-based elements rather than as a universal capacity. It then examines the social processes intrinsic to creative practice based on publicly-focused engagements. It outlines how these might address key elements of community resilience in terms of the social processes they perform. The paper argues that this unpacking is a prerequisite for any attempt to think more systematically about how creative practices might facilitate building community resilience in place. It concludes by turning to the notion of community itself and explores how thinking developed through the paper might have informed two located case studies.