Participatory action research: tools for disaster resilience education

Abstract

Purpose Participatory action research can improve scientific knowledge and community capacity to address disaster resilience and environmental justice. Evidence from the literature suggests that resident participation enhances assessment of environmental risks, raises awareness, and empowers residents to fight for equitable distribution of hazard and climate risk adaptations. Yet, risk assessment and urban planning processes still frequently operate within expertise-driven groups without significant community engagement. Such fragmentation results in part from a lack of appreciation for community expertise in built environment adaptations and educational tools to support resident involvement in the often technical built environment planning processes. Approach A participatory research and place-based education project was developed that enhanced co-learning between residents and researchers while collecting and analyzing local data on flood resilience in the built environment. Five research activities constitute the curriculum of resilience education on stormwater infrastructure: 1) establishment of partnership agreement/MOU, 2) participatory GIS to identify flooding issues, 3) water quality testing and health survey, 4) stormwater infrastructure assessment, and 5) urban/landscape design. Partners included high school and college students, residents, and environmental justice organizations. Findings Outcomes include a stakeholder approved infrastructure assessment smartphone application, neighborhood maps of drainage issues, a report of water containments, and neighborhood-scaled green infrastructure provisions and growth plans. Findings indicate that participatory research positively contributed to resilience knowledge of participants. Value This paper outlines an interdisciplinary pedagogical strategy for resilience planning that engages residents to assess and monitor the performance of stormwater infrastructure and create resilience plans. The paper also discusses challenges and opportunities for similar participatory projects.

The development of a participatory assessment technique for infrastructure: Neighborhood-level monitoring towards sustainable infrastructure systems

“…This approach naturally fosters discussion amongst researchers, participants, and local residents on the street who observe the process (Meyer et al, forthcoming). There is usually a lack of diversity and inclusion in urban planning in general and the management of these more specialized areas, such as infrastructure, and has been left to professional engineers (Pitt & Bassett, 2013).…”

Citizen Science-Informed Community Master Planning: Land Use and Built Environment Changes to Increase Flood Resilience and Decrease Contaminant Exposure

“…Service-learning projects typically involve a series of collaborative actions with communities, including consultation, information sessions, data gathering, and feedback loops [25,32,33]. This project involved initial presentations about the findings from environmental sampling to inform communities about their potential exposures.…”

“…The number of participatory urban design projects has increased in underserved communities in recent years, in part to address problems associated with environmental justice [24]. Urban design, in essence, is a problem-solving venture, which makes it well suited to a service-learning or problem-based learning approach [25] In academic settings, service-learning is an alternative teaching model that goes beyond traditional lecture-based teaching to include learning through engagement with community groups to provide students with engaged projects [26][27][28]. Due to the high costs involved with typical urban design projects, marginalized communities can work with university faculty and students to develop conceptual designs that address neighborhood problems and reduce the costs associated with the development of the initial designs [29,30].…”

Human health in systemic adaptation to climate change: insights from flood risk management in a river basin

“…Health aspects of floods, and of extreme weather events and natural disasters in general, present particularly complex challenges to existing systems of governance, both within health care and in adjacent areas such as building and infrastructure (Bardy and Parrukoski 2010; MoI 2019). Concepts of and approaches to health need to be extended to cover better the various aspects of health and well-being, including mental and social dimensions and outcomes (Greene et al 2015;Lamond et al 2015), the benefits from health promotion and from disease prevention, the distributions of health risks and benefits among particular groups (Jimenez et al 2013) and the capacities of communities to ensure health and well-being (Meyer et al 2018) along with the attainment of other goals in the context of flood risks. Such extensions call for a broad, integrative and active notion of health, which is to be carried over to risk governance deliberations and interventions.…”

“…Heuristic approaches encompassing the variability and evolution of views through participation have advantages, e.g. in education and social learning (Meyer et al 2018). It seems natural to combine such heuristic methods with quantitative and formal decision support systems.…”