Breaking the vicious cycle: Planning water security in low-income urban neighbourhoods through co-creation

Summary

Our project showcases community based participatory methods that are very useful in systematising lived knowledge and localised data sets. Through such systematisation and generation of local data we hope to influence impact-driven research and policy-making. This counters the current ‘topdown’ approach to knowledge generation, focused on global or national concerns and data sets. 

We focused on the issue of water – the lack of availability, poor quality of water, and water hazards like flooding – that urban poor communities face in their everyday lives. Inter-generational participatory methods were used to systematise knowledge around an urban poor community’s daily struggles to access water, and help them build understanding of the impact that lack of quality water has on their lives, and the continued shortage due to climate change.

Arts-based methods with adolescents generated their perspectives on use (or misuse) of water resources and basic understanding of climate change. Dialogue, as a process of co-learning, was facilitated, in which community members begin to understand what is climate change, and ‘experts’ learn what it means to live without access to quality water. 

Written and audio-visual documentation of the participatory processes, and sharing back with the community the analysis of the data collected and the edited audio-visual material, is an important part of the co-creation process we have used in this project.