As the UK Covid-19
inquiry gets underway and the country’s pandemic preparedness is examined, new performance
research is making a significant impact on the future of emergency planning in
the UK and beyond.
The Covid-19 pandemic
challenged the country’s resilience in ways that most of the population have
never witnessed. It also brought to the fore the vital role that emergency
planning plays in preparing for, responding to and recovering from crises.
With that came calls for new ideas - ways of identifying and responding
to local and city challenges both at speed and creatively.
To address this need for innovation,
academics from Northumbria
University, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Brunel University London investigated the
ways in which arts, culture, and performance can open up new perspectives on
city emergency and resilience strategy and practice, both in the context of Covid-19 and for future emergencies.
Dr Patrick Duggan and Dr Stuart Andrews’ 21-month project, Social
Distancing and Reimagining City Life: Performative strategies and practices for
response and recovery in and beyond lockdown, started in December 2020. Since
then, their research, which was funded by the
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), has helped several organisations and councils, such as those in Bristol,
Cumbria, Newham, Northumberland and North Tyneside, to think and work
differently – in both day-to-day practice and long-term strategy.
New ways of debriefing
The Emergency
Planning Society (EPS), began working with Dr Duggan and Dr Andrews after
reading their interim project report. With over 1200 members across the UK and internationally, the EPS is
the UK’s leading membership body for professionals working or studying in
disaster management, emergency response and resilience.
Jeannie Barr, Interim
Chair, Emergency Planning Society, said: “Andrews’ and Duggan’s research has
had a swift impact on our work that contributes to the future of emergency
planning in the UK and internationally.
“Their work has led to
several key changes that will be of significant benefit to the Society’s
membership, and to our understandings of what good emergency planning looks
like. This positively impacts on how we might help support our members to develop
their professional practice, which will have significant wider societal
benefits.
“The research
revealed a critical gap in the ways resilience address approaches to coping
with workplaces stresses in emergency planning. Our members were
collectively experiencing a need for processes and practices of decompressing
from work and means of taking breaks even during live events.”
Responding to this
newly identified need, the academics were invited to develop what they termed ‘A Toolkit of Creative Strategies for Personal Debriefing’. Existing
procedures for debriefing after a particular incident are normally conducted at
organisational or inter-agency levels, not with individuals or at team level.
Jeannie Barr explained that conventional debriefs “focus
on the technical aspects of any response and would not consider the human element
of any response or rather how an individual reacts to a crisis situation before,
during or after that crisis. This in turn resulted in lessons gathered during
the de-brief process [being] identified but not learnt.
“To learn to do something differently, whether
process, procedure or action requires a change specifically to things like
routine, behaviours, muscle memory and learned behaviours etc. The toolkit
provides an enormously beneficial new approach to debriefing that centres on
individuals and teams, that opens the space for individuals to consider things
from a different perspective, to use things like creative thinking as an
approach to problem solving, that reduces fear of change and provides some
tools that will support an individual with the emotional aspects of crisis and
acceptance of the need for change. So important is this contribution that it
has been integrated into our recently updated core competencies framework.”
Valuing creative practice
Northumberland County Council and Bristol City Council have been Involved
in the research project from its inception. Both have noted how rewarding the
work has been and the positive impact it has had and will continue to have on
their respective councils and communities.
Bristol City Council’s Corporate Strategy
identifies ‘resilience’ as one of its building blocks. Jim Gillman, City
Operational Planning and Response Manager, Bristol City Council, said: “As we
move from a pandemic to cost of living crisis and we increasingly understand
emergencies as wider than ‘no notice, immediate impact events’… [Andrews’ and
Duggan’s] research offers valuable new ‘access routes’ into communities to talk
about risk and resilience. Routes that leave behind the ‘dry’, top down,
traditional emergency planning approach and allow a more democratic
conversation, driven by the communities and articulated through cultural,
performative and artistic networks, organisations and the content of their outputs.
Far more effective than a ‘Community Resilience Plan’!”
Helen Hinds, Business Resilience and Emergency Planning Lead,
Northumberland County Council, said: “Andrews’ and Duggan’s findings reveal
that performance methodologies provide what I think of as the interconnective
tissue between what, on the surface, seem like disparate skills and activities.
Performance can enable difficult conversations and engender a new approach to
how we work. It reinforces the need for diverse voices and provides new methods
to try something different, to challenge and to not be afraid to be creative.”
In Newham, the research
has directly influenced the development of public policy that will have a
substantial, material, and long-term impact on the cultural environment of the London
Borough and on the wellbeing of its population of over 350,000 people. It has
also had an impact on the way the Council understands the importance of and
develops future policy for culture, creativity, and the arts in Newham.
Dr Duggan and Dr Andrews have also been invited to be involved in the
development of North Tyneside Council’s new cultural strategy.
Head of Culture, Steve Bishop, said that their work had triggered new
conversations within the Authority about the positioning of culture as a
service area and also how it should be embedded in the Council’s approach to
priorities around the climate change, equalities, community engagement and
place agendas.
Professor
Andy Long, Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive at Northumbria University, said:
“Northumbria is developing a strong reputation for driving research which
delivers real impact. It’s great to see this interdisciplinary project make
such an impact on the future of emergency planning. Andrews’ and Duggan’s
research highlights the need for new approaches to emergency planning and
resilience work, especially given the breadth of unprecedented events that
hazard mitigation, sustainability and resilience professionals have had to deal
with in recent years. It’s also fantastic to see arts research at the forefront
of innovations in these essential and complex fields.”
Professor
Andrew Jones, Brunel University London’s Vice-Chancellor and President, said:
“This project shines a spotlight on the impact of the arts in our society, and
on the value of arts research as part of an interdisciplinary approach to
tackling the challenges we face.”
The
impact of Dr Duggan and Dr Andrews’ research in this area has also been seen
internationally. In February 2022, Austin Feldbaum, Hazard Mitigation
Administrator at City of New Orleans, said that Dr Duggan and Dr Andrews’ earlier research helped the city of New Orleans to understand the importance of leveraging the
city’s ‘cultural vernacular’ as a means of pandemic response. Their research
encouraged the city to recognise the need to ‘lift up the work’ of cultural
practitioners in New Orleans as a means of communicating Covid-19 public health
messages ‘with citizens in terms they could understand’.
The
team presented the newly launched toolkit and wider findings from the research
at the Emergency Services Show and the International Security Expo in September.
For
more information about the project please visit www.performingcityresilience.com
