Fostering Social Resilience for Flooding Preparedness: Co-designing for Collective Action with Eastside Detroit Community Leaders

Abstract

Today, the Eastside of Detroit, home to a strong social network of neighbors, communities, and organizations, is challenged by serious and frequent flooding. This is a complex issue as it grapples with the systems scale of Detroit’s aging infrastructure system and social equity issues, exacerbated by climate change. For Eastside Detroit residents, current flooding preparedness protocol is incredibly individualized. It’s isolating and overwhelming and many residents don’t feel comfortable asking for help. Through this community-based design project, I co-created three design interventions with residents to shift the status quo of flooding preparedness from individual to collective, and tap into inherent play, joy, and fun in the face of hard experiences. Each design intervention works with three different scales of community power: the neighborhood, the task force, and the organizational scale. Through principles from participatory action research (PAR) this project centers on using co-design to surface tacit knowledge collectively with Eastside Detroit residents. The design interventions adapt the EAST Behavioral Framework to include play to increase resident buy-in for a reorientation to flooding preparedness. Through generating ideas together, social bonds between community members are strengthened, to build collective power for action.The key findings of this project reveal that creativity, fun, and play, though may feel counterintuitive during times of disaster, are crucial to forming social bonds and generating resident-driven novel ideas for flooding preparedness.

According to PG Watkins, facilitator and community organizer in Detroit, “Building power is the science of relationships”. While the subject of this project has been flooding, on a broader scale, the impact is designing for resilience through trauma and the human ability to work together and tap into innate joy, creativity, and play, to persevere through hard spaces.