Coffee & cake with Franz Krause: water, war and 'communitas'

Informal presentation on dealing with some of the biggest floods in UK history

Speaker: Franz Krause

Venue: 23 St Machar Drive

The summer 2007 floods that are held responsible for thirteen deaths, 44600 flooded homes, and damages worth three billion pounds have been described as the ‘biggest civil emergency in British history’. One of the most severely affected areas was Gloucestershire, where an unprecedented combination of pluvial and fluvial flooding not only inundated buildings and roads, but also caused the breakdown of the mains water supply for a fortnight.

Today, people in Gloucestershire remember the floods with mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is a sense of vulnerability, and disappointment with official flood warning and relief. On the other hand, the floods have catalysed mutual help and community action to a degree that makes many affected people refer to a ‘blitz spirit’. Where formal structures failed, spontaneous generosity thrived.
In the context of ‘Big Society’ discourse, community resilience efforts, and an uneasy realization that land use and climate change may bring about extreme flood more regularly, this presentation looks into some of the relations between floods and communities. It will draw on preliminary results and thoughts from an ongoing research project on ‘flood memories’ and ‘community resilience’, in order to explore questions including: How is the experience of a ‘natural disaster’ linked to a surge in community action? And what sorts of relations were reinforced and which ones were neglected in coping with the floods?

Franz works at the Countryside and Community Research Institute, and is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, UK. In 2010, he was awarded a PhD for his research on uses and meanings of the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland, and the mutual influences of river dwellers and river.

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