ABSTRACT
Resilience of place-based communities can increase or decrease over time, as can their archiving and sharing of past experience about dealing with flood impacts – both routine and extreme. This chapter explores the idea of ‘flood heritage’ as a concept, process, and practice, and its relationships with building community resilience in local flood risk management. It asks:
How can ‘flood heritage’ be defined for communities within a particular locale? How might these explorations develop our understanding of local resilience?
What is the nature of the ‘flood archive’ and how is it changing – in what is captured and shared, how, and with whom? What are the implications of these changes?
What can be learnt from researching how people in a specific locale dealt with flood risk, its uncertainty, and floods in the past?
(How) can this archival knowledge, as community capital, be protected, accessed, and applied by communities in flood risk management in the future?
The chapter explores the strengths and limitations of different forms of materialisation – written, oral, visual – within the flood archive, and whose voices are included. It highlights the potential of a place-based, flood heritage approach to community resilience building. It then proposes the importance of communities building, organising, and sharing their archival knowledge about coping with, and adapting to, floods – as a valuable resource for sharing within and between at-risk communities.
