Performing City Resilience in Action
We work internationally on projects that explore intersections between ideas, strategies and practices in the arts and in emergency planning and resilience.
Current Projects
New Orleans
We’ve been working on arts and resilience in New Orleans since 2017. Our work in the city was fundamental to our emerging methodology and we continue to be in conversation with colleagues in arts and resilience in the city. Our book, Performing New Orleans: Rethinking Resilience in Art and Everyday Life (LSU Press, 2025) calls for greater attention to the breadth of arts practices in the city and their vital work in addressing critical resilience challenges in the city.
Find out more: Performing City Resilience in New Orleans
UK Arts-Resilience Practices
Our work in the UK grew out of our funded research on arts and resilience in response to COVID-19 (2020-2022), where we worked particularly with individual resilience teams and also with the Emergency Planning Society, with its membership of approximately 1200 emergency planners. From that early work, we continue to be in live conversation with arts and resilience practitioners about intersections between arts and resilience nationally and in UK cities, towns, and regions. We have published widely on this work in our report Performance as City Pandemic Response, on public art as resilience practice and on the vital contribution of arts and culture to strategies of whole society resilience. Our Toolkit of Creative Strategies for Personal Debriefing was commissioned and published by the EPS. See our COVID-19 project page.
Case Studies
These case studies illustrate how our approach has supported strategic clarity, organisational change, policy development and reflective practice — often in high‑pressure contexts.
Case Study: Emergency Planning (National: UK)
Embedding creativity in national professional standards
We worked with emergency planners across the UK to explore how performance research could support more reflective, sustainable, and human-focused practice. Through a series of discussions, workshops and shared explorations, a critical gap emerged: existing professional guidance offered little support for individual or team debriefing. Our work provided practical, creative methods to address this gap, helping practitioners reflect on pressure, decision-making and emotional load. These approaches were taken up widely and led to creativity being formally integrated into the Emergency Planning Society’s updated Core Competencies Framework. The shift has strengthened reflective practice nationally and equipped members with new tools to understand and improve their everyday work.
Case Study: Newham (London, UK)
Evidencing the strategic value of cultural planning for the long term
In Newham, we collaborated with cultural policymakers exploring how arts and cultural practice contribute to recovery, community life, and long-term place-making. Our performance research perspective offered a way to see the Borough’s cultural ecosystem more clearly, and to frame the role of arts and culture in relation to broader social and spatial pressures. Our work helped refine strategic priorities and informed the development of cultural planning, contributing to a clearer understanding of how culture supports community wellbeing, civic identity and the Borough’s future direction. Partners described the process as offering insight that shaped both immediate decisions and the emerging long-term cultural strategy.
Case Study: New Orleans (USA)
Embedding arts and culture into city resilience planning
Our long-term collaboration in New Orleans involves working with arts leaders, city officials, and resilience professionals to explore how performance research could illuminate city-wide challenges. Through workshops, site-based sessions and strategy conversations, we have supported partners to recognise the strategic role of cultural practice and creative ways of understanding place. This work contributed to the city’s resilience office developing ways to embed arts and culture in planning and policy, and led to new cross-arts collaborations at city level. Partners noted that the clarity, alignment, and shared language created through the process led to practical changes in planning, relationship-building and long-term strategic thinking.
Case Study: Arts New Orleans (USA)
Building clarity, organizational alignment and renewed strategic confidence
Working with Arts New Orleans, we supported senior staff to step back from day-to-day pressures and consider the organisation’s role within the wider cultural and civic landscape. Through guided reflection and performance research exercises, the team were able to reveal and reflect on the scale of their work in the city, reconnect with purpose, and identify where strategy, communication and decision-making could evolve. This process informed shifts in internal planning, refreshed approaches to grantmaking and strengthened links between programme aims and community context. Staff described the process as offering rare clarity: a calm, structured environment in which to see their work differently and take confident next steps.
Case Study: Trepwise (USA)
Building a shared language to strengthen systems thinking
Trepwise, a strategic consultancy based in New Orleans, invited us to explore how performance research might support their work on systems change and cultural strategy. Through conversations and a dedicated workshop, we created a shared conceptual and practical vocabulary that helped the team connect their own methods with performance-led insight. The session deepened their understanding of systems, community dynamics and organisational behaviour, offering new angles for engagement and strategy. Team members noted that the work provided a common language for thinking about complexity and opened space for new problem-solving approaches across client projects in multiple cities.
Tracking Impact
For detailed statements on the ways Performing City Resilience has helped organisations advance their practice, see our impact page.
