- Posted on April 25th, 2025
Insights: Peer-Sharing Session on Place-Based Adaptation for Culture
Climate change impacts are unequally distributed, affecting different places and people in unique ways. Adopting a place-based approach to climate adaptation is about understanding the risks at a local level: understanding both physical and social geographies alongside social inequities, community values, knowledge and experiences. Working collaboratively with communities and across sectors is vital to shape the best possible outcomes for each specific place and context.
This March 2025, Julie’s Bicycle facilitated a peer-sharing session for those working on place-based adaptation to climate change, exploring how we can work towards community-led, locally inspired solutions in a changing climate.
At the peer sharing, we invited artists, cultural institutions, academics, consultants and government representatives who are at the forefront of this work to share their experiences of the unique roles that culture and creatives are playing in shaping place-based approaches to climate adaptation. The session created a space for participants to discuss, connect, and learn from each other. Here we share key insights from the discussions.
What can culturally-led place-based approaches to adaptation look like?
We heard an inspiring diversity of ways in which arts and culture are shaping place-based projects. Some examples of the projects shared included: a collaboration with a community-led housing scheme; working with young people to connect to nature; creating a community resilience hub; capturing community perspectives on cultural heritage loss due to climate change, and; a cultural organisation who are deeply embedded in their community, fostering co-design and intercultural dialogue.
How can culture and creativity uniquely shape place-based adaptation?
• Fostering collective identity and belonging: Many participants emphasised that cultural initiatives reinforce community bonds and cohesion, making people more invested in protecting and adapting their local environments. The physical space provided by cultural venues can be central to bringing different people from across a community together, especially where there are opportunities for community members to be involved in the design, creation and running of that space. For example, The Portland Inn Project in Stoke on Trent shared their work within a Victorian terrace neighbourhood, where they are working with local people to convert a derelict pub building into a thriving community space. The project aims to be responsive to local needs and includes a community decision making panel and focuses on sustainable design.
• Deep community relationships: Arts and cultural organisations are often already deeply embedded in their communities and have involvement with communities over long periods of time. From this unique position, organisations can engage with their communities and bring them into co-design processes for local climate adaptation projects, incorporating their perspectives, needs and solutions. In-Situ spoke about the importance of enabling ‘ground-up’ action in their work, challenging pre-determined outcomes for artist commissions and instead, building and sustaining an embedded local context to invite artists into as part of a long-term process of reparation and systemic change. They have negotiated a flat organisational structure with key partner organisations, promote intercultural and intergenerational dialogue to name and challenge inequality, and provide long-term artist residencies to support local access to nature, climate adaptation and food sustainability.
• Building bridges The arts can play a unique role in building connection and collaborations, acting as a bridge between communities, councils and decision-makers on adaptation solutions. For example, one participant referenced ‘The Air We Share’ project in Galway, Ireland, which aims to make the invisible issue of air pollution visible, through artistic interventions, citizen science and community action in Westside, Galway. The Galway Arts Centre and City Council have commissioned artists to respond to air quality and pollution research. Communities are also at the heart of the project: through inclusive approaches to communication and engagement the project aims to build understanding of the causes and consequences of the climate and ecological crisis, and open opportunities for the co-creation of climate solutions with the community.
• Translating adaptation and reimagining possibilities: Arts and culture can act as a medium to help process the sometimes overwhelming information and science on adaptation and climate change. By blending imagination with real-world adaptation strategies, culture-led projects can encourage bold thinking, enabling communities to envision and work toward more sustainable futures. For example, tools such as storymaking can lead to concrete examples of how to transform local spaces, as well as new narratives, inspiring new thinking around particular issues and helping to build a wider sense of agency. One participant shared the example of the Transition Tooting ‘Town Anywhere’ project, which brought together around 100 people from all ages and backgrounds to collectively dream into Tooting’s possible futures.
Crucially, arts and culture can surface stories of systemic injustice through their community work and highlight these to policy-makers, to advocate for new, community-focused ways of working which empower marginalised voices. For example, one participant spoke about a new project which brings together residents and policy-makers using ecoscenography exploration as a way to advocate for arts participation in policy making and city planning in Blackpool town centre. The project aims to host an eco-lab with theatre makers and designers and give residents a voice in shaping the future of the town centre, by re-designing vacant and under-utilised spaces with art and green infrastructure.
How can arts and culture influence local decision-making and adaptation planning?
• Shaping policy narratives towards community-centred approaches: Local authority adaptation and resilience approaches can tend to focus more on technical and scientific risks, economic impacts and infrastructural approaches to adaptation. How climate change is and will increasingly affect people and communities can sometimes be left out of assessments and decision-making. Arts and culture can address this issue by engaging policymakers through creative advocacy. Several participants shared how their cultural initiatives transformed climate adaptation from a policy issue into a tangible, shared community experience. For example, one participant described how a gardening club helped residents to connect with nature locally and consequently speak out against development plans threatening biodiversity loss. Equally, culture and creative processes can help communities understand the key climate issues in their place, helping to demystify alienating language and building citizens capacity to define locally relevant policy issues. For example, Civic and Social spoke about their current project supported by Stockport Mayoral Development Corporation, Resilient Cities Network and the English Cities Fund, which is turning a disused Victorian building in Edgeley, Stockport, into a community hub for social and climate resilience. The project builds on local consultations with over 700 residents helping to shape ideas over several months at the “ideas café – growing a locally relevant space for community events, skills building and bringing local people together.
• Arts and culture can gather evidence about community priorities: By documenting and showcasing community concerns through art and creative projects, cultural collaborative projects can inform adaptation policies and funding priorities. One participant highlighted how sharing stories around their work is central to their approach: they make assets such as short films and leaflets about community-identified priorities to use for advocacy in policy spaces. They also record community experiences and include these in response to government consultations and calls for evidence.
• Sustaining long-term adaptation efforts: Cultural institutions, such as museums and libraries, can serve as long-term hubs for adaptation education, ensuring that knowledge and strategies evolve with community needs over time.
• Embedding culture in urban planning and design: Collaborations between artists and urban planners can integrate adaptive design elements into city planning processes. One example supported the creation of flood-resilient public spaces.
• Bringing together those who can affect change: Culture can help to facilitate forums for exchange which can combat ‘Consultation Fatigue’. Culture-led conversations designed to be non-extractive and transparent can involve people who can create change at different levels, for example, local authorities, universities and other key stakeholders.
• Leveraging and building local capacity: social resilience needs both physical and social skills development. Arts can help to build emotional resilience, connection and cohesion as well as technical skills such as green design skills, material innovation and creative problem solving. One participant shared their experience of a Living Lab and bi-weekly working group as an example of capacity building: bringing together diverse stakeholders for building skills in materials use, in making, systems thinking and story-telling, sharing experiences and building confidence together.
Looking ahead: addressing the challenges
These were some of the current challenges faced by participants in their place-based work:
• The need for more holistic approaches: Some participants spoke about the challenges of working in silos rather than across disciplines and the need to bring together the natural environment, culture, heritage, public health and local authorities to do this work. Adaptation is an interdisciplinary issue that has shared benefits across sectors, but often funding and programmes are run separately for different sectors.
• Lack of capacity: On the ground nature-based adaptation measures often need to be informed by ecologists for the best outcomes, but the nature conservation sector has capacity and funding issues that create barriers to participation.
• Evidencing the social value of arts and cultural projects: Participants spoke about the need to evidence the impact of their work in order to unlock more investment in arts, culture and resilience projects. This is especially the case where there are conflicting interests e.g. with developers, or other local council priorities when resources are under pressure. Another related issue is around how to demonstrate the value of slower, more iterative and relational work, and evidence the positive results from working in this way.
• Cultural and social shifts can take time (sometimes generations!), and need safe, trusted spaces to start conversations, especially with marginalised groups. Empowering communities has to be approached with sensitivity and awareness of different community members’ needs, cultural traditions and practices. For example, ensuring that opportunities to learn new skills or contribute to projects are inclusive and accessible to everyone. One participant shared the example of ‘Flock Together’ a platform that challenges the underrepresentation of Black, Brown and other People of Colour in the outdoors space.
• Finding a new ‘why’ for cultural institutions and museums that moves beyond their own history and traditions, to welcome local knowledge, and make the space accessible and welcoming to everyone. For example, The Happy Museum Project is running an ‘Open Conversation Programme’ during 2025. One of their sessions ‘Museum Storytelling for Transformative Change’ explored how innovative approaches could help museums and their audiences imagine new possibilities and open up capacity and agency for change. “When we tell stories of change, of ourselves and our collections, it is easy for us to fall into familiar patterns and narratives about the past, present and future. What is missing from these stories, and how do they limit us in thinking about what could be?” The Happy Museum Project.
• Engaging communities that might be most impacted by climate change, but who might not have the capacity or the opportunity to engage with adaptation issues. For example, low-income and global majority communities tend to live further away from green spaces, which might be the focal point for adaptation projects. Further barriers to participation may exist for those working long hours on low incomes, or with caring responsibilities and a number of structural intersecting marginalities that prevent participation. This highlights the need for making adaptation projects as accessible and inclusive as possible, for example, finding ways to engage vulnerable communities in the places where they live and work, by avoiding scientific language around ‘climate change adaptation’ and instead highlighting the social or creative benefits of participation.
Key takeaways
• Arts and Culture play a vital role in community-led approaches to place-based adaptation. Cultural initiatives are fostering community cohesion, championing co-design of places and enabling participatory decision making through leveraging their unique role and relationships in different places.
• Cultural approaches can act as an important bridge between communities and policy makers, helping to forefront the issues that matter most to communities and helping to make policy issues relatable, as well as building trust and giving a voice to those who have faced systemic injustices. However, this needs much more shared goal setting at strategic level and dialogue to ensure that cultural outcomes are able to directly help shape and influence policy.
• Working in partnership is crucial to the success of effective place-based adaptation approaches. Artists and cultural organisations who are embedded within their communities are well placed to bring stakeholders together to build holistic and imaginative approaches for the resilient future of places and build agency through creativity and their established roles in communities.
• Successful community engagement work is often built over long periods of time. Ongoing engagement with communities helps to build trust, local cohesion and allows artists and cultural organisations to ‘rehearse’ relationship building with communities over time, developing ideas about the future, skills and knowledge. However, project funding cycles often do not align to this way of working, and longer term investments are needed to create legacy and long term resilience.