Understanding local community construction through flooding: the ‘conscious community’ and the possibilities for locally based communal action

Communities, in particular geographically based local communities, have become a key site for disaster intervention, often expressed through the promotion of ‘community resilience’. However, the complexity of the community concept or the potential difficulties of such an approach are not always appreciated. Qualitative semi-structured interviews with residents in flooded localities in both urban and rural contexts in northern England reveal a complex relationship between attachment to the locality, communal identities and local networks. This relationship is explained through the proposed concept of the ‘conscious community’, which builds on the conceptualisation of community as a structure of meaning, to show how the cultural, spatial and social elements of local community creation are inextricably linked. The local communities created by residents could take very varied forms, and so their ability to take on the tasks increasingly expected of them in a shift to a localised and community-based approach to flood risk management (FRM) was also very varied. In the urban context the flood experience proved a significant factor in community construction, and thereby responses to subsequent flooding. Residents did much to help one another, both physically and emotionally, but it cannot be assumed that the largely informal networks of the ‘conscious community’ are able to take on more formal FRM tasks. Yet a better understanding of local community construction could allow practitioners to utilise, support or build on local structures to enable local communities to be better prepared for flooding.