Hi,

Stephanie, can you clarify planning: do you mean just the general actions people take to increase preparedness against flood risk or do you mean the official process of planning regulation administered by the local council? If it's the latter, this powerpoint presentation by Sylvia Tunstall et al. I saw at one of the flood risk management research consortium workshops, describes a lot of detail about the planning and flood risk process in Carlisle:

http://web.sbe.hw.ac.uk/frmrc/downloads/Event_Presentations/Carlisle_Colocation/Socio-economic%20futures%20in%20Carlisle,%20a%20basis%20for%20futures%20modelling_STunstall.ppt

Other things I've come across:

The National Flood Forum (UK) website has a number of community case studies:

http://nationalfloodforum.org.uk/flood-risk-community-groups/community-flood-plans/

Here are two papers I think are good at considering community knowledge and its role in flood risk management strategy:

McEwen, Lindsey, and Owain Jones. "Building local/lay flood knowledges into community flood resilience planning after the July 2007 floods, Gloucestershire, UK." Hydrology Research 43.5 (2012).

Ashley, R. M., et al. "Learning and Action Alliances to build capacity for flood resilience." Journal of Flood Risk Management 5.1 (2012): 14-22.

Finally, there was a good study of the after effects of the flooding in Hull and how the community can help to mitigate the impact:

Whittle, R., Medd, W., Deeming, H., Kashefi, E., Mort, M., Twigger Ross, C., Walker, G. & Watson, N. (2010) After the Rain – learning the lessons from flood recovery in Hull, final project report for "Flood, Vulnerability and Urban Resilience: a real-time study of local recovery following the floods of June 2007 in Hull" Lancaster University Lancaster, UK

link: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lec/sites/cswm/Hull%20Floods%20Project/AFTER%20THE%20RAIN%20FINAL%20REPORT.pdf

This is an interesting question and I'd also like to find out about any other methods and case studies concerned with increasing flood resistance via action at the community level.

hi David,

Thank you very much for sharing that information with me, In a sense I suppose I am getting at both the actions of individuals to take measures to protect both themselves and their community but also the official process of planning in the UK for community flood resilience, it would seem that government policy suggests communities need to be taking greater action and responsibility for there resilience towards flooding yet provide very little support for this.

one method I was investigating is the Neighbourhood development plan, where communities can have greater control and engagement with local development and I was wondering if this could be an effective way for communities to not only develop in the way that they want but also use it as a method of increasing social capital and increase flood resilience by making people aware of flood risk in their area and incorporating into sustainable neighbourhood development plans for the future.

I hope that explains what I am looking into?

Hi Stephanie,

Don't know if this blog that I wrote may help you out - http://blog.disasterexpert.org/2012/08/community-based-humanitarian-response.html - it leverages Arnstein's ladder of participation to measure different levels of participation. We in the disaster world can learn a bunch about participation from the urban planning world.

Gisli