Multi-Story Water: Cultivating environmental citizenship in West Yorkshire through sited performance research

Narrative

Multi-Story Water (MSW) was a community-facing, practice-as-research project aimed at developing understanding and engagement between local communities and responsible agencies in flood-prone areas of Yorkshire’s Aire valley. The project used site-responsive creative methods to stimulate community dialogue and capacity building, in an evolving, participatory process. Notable impacts for communities and stakeholders in Yorkshire include: catalysing the foundation of a housing estate residents’ group which has since secured significant riverside landscape improvements; creating a stakeholder network group which has informed communication strategies in the water sector, with benefits for the Environment Agency, local councils and charities; and contributions to innovative public communications strategies highlighting major flood alleviation and river improvement schemes. Although much of the impact is geographically local, the research has had national reach, through the sharing of outcomes (performances, films, blog posts) among senior professionals.

Impact date	2014 → 2020
Category of impact	Attitudes and behaviours, Awareness and understanding, Environmental, Society and culture