Waterside Voices: connecting communities to waterscapes

ongoing

In urban areas, climate change is putting Europe's water resources under immense pressure. The unused potential of rivers and canals to create resilience, provide access to a healthy, green and sustainable city, as well as to improve social cohesion, cannot be ignored. Vulnerable social groups are the least equipped to adapt to and bring about these changes ecologically, economically and culturally. The ways by which communities are able to connect to waterscapes is crucial in their understanding of the ecosystem they inhabit, ultimately resulting in greener life strategies and cultural paradigms. Accessibility of these bodies of water has a large influence on public perception, relations, engagement and ownership that city-dwellers cultivate with these spaces. By developing and testing new practices and models in line with the European Green Deal and NEB principles, the Waterside Voices project aims to investigate how marginalised voices connect to urban waterscapes, in search of ways to increase their spatial agency towards a more equitable and sustainable city-dwelling through culture. The project includes the research, development, implementation and testing of three creative interventions on three distinct European urban waterscapes as the result of extended processes of participatory design research and co-design. By creating a shared understanding through participatory inquiry, the project designs a broad rendering of current phenomena, participatory storytelling of water-related narratives and multiple creative outputs for a long-term shift in the accessibility of and connectivity to urban waterfronts. These creative, sustainable and inclusive outputs, co-designed and co-stewarded by vulnerable communities they target, aim to increase long-term cross-sectoral accessibility and engagement with waterscapes, raise awareness of common issues and goals, as well as ensure highly effective transnational dissemination and transfer of best practices.