Sustainable flood memories, lay knowledges and the development of community resilience to future flood risk

This paper explores results from interdisciplinary research on ‘sustainable flood memory’ in the context of effective flood risk management. The project aims to increase understanding of how flood memories provide a platform for developing and sharing lay knowledge, creating social learning opportunities and increasing communities’ adaptive capacities for resilience.

The paper starts by conceptually framing resilience, community, lay knowledge and flood memory. It then discusses key themes drawn from semi-structured interviews with floodplain residents affected by the UK summer 2007 floods. These interviews explored and contrasted residents flood histories, experiences and kinds of ‘communities’.

Sustainable flood memories were found to be associated with relational ways of knowing, situated in emotions, and changed community tensions. These all influenced active remembering and active forgetting. The paper reflects on varying integrations of memory, lay knowledge and resilience, and critically evaluates implications of the sustainable flood memory concept for the strategy, process and practice of developing community flood resilience.

Given the importance of ‘memory work’, the paper proposes a framework to translate the concept practically into community resilience initiatives, and to inform how risk and flood experiences are communicated within communities.

This document is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). E3S Web of Conferences, 2016, 7, 09002