Performing City Resilience: Addressing real-world challenges through performance research
Understanding and addressing resilience challenges requires more than technical solutions. It demands attention to the ways in which people live in and make sense of a place.
Working with colleagues in arts, culture, resilience and emergency planning in cities and regions internationally, we have developed established methods for generating new understandings, practices, and strategies for enacting whole society resilience.
We collaborate with arts and resilience teams and with allied organisations, policymakers, and local government to develop responses to complex situations and decisions, drawing on findings, methods, and practices from performance research.
How Performance Research Addresses Resilience Challenges
Performance isn’t just what happens on a stage.
It’s how communities and organisations meet, make decisions, communicate, collaborate, plan, and respond.
Performances can comprise extraordinary events or everyday practices through which we make sense of the world. By understanding existing performance cultures of a place — and facilitating tailored activities and interventions — we work with partner organizations and local networks to co-design responses to resilience challenges, grounded in local understandings and practices of place.
The more we understand the performance practices of a community, team, network, organisation or place, the more we can work with partners to devise, rehearse, and develop those practices.
Our methods enable organisations to operate and collaborate with greater clarity, connection, and purpose.
How We Work: Thinking Together for Whole Society Resilience
Our work combines distinct strands of research, consultancy, and knowledge exchange. Our methods include workshops, site-surveys, and structured discussions, together with conventional desk-based research.
We work with all kinds of organisations. Often this involves partners in arts and culture, resilience and emergency planning, and place and environment management, but we’re all a part of performances of place and so we also work with colleagues in many allied fields and across local government.
Building trust is vital, especially with communities for whom ‘resilience’ is a term that has been used in in challenging ways. As a result, we work iteratively, sharing emerging findings, responding to emerging situations, before consolidating findings.
Our projects contribute new ways of thinking together — at a whole-society level — about how we respond to challenges that impact, or threaten to impact, on communities.
Work With Us
Our work begins with conversation — understanding needs, priorities, and concerns. From there, we work with partners to shape context-specific approaches, whether through research, working with existing networks, organisational development, strategic planning, or longer-term collaboration.
If you’re interested in rethinking the familiar — in arts and culture, resilience and emergency planning, place and environmental management, or related fields — we’d welcome a conversation.
Performing City Resilience is ‘re-thinking the way a city system is run’
Sarah Toy, Director, Sarah Toy Consulting, UK