Abstract
This is a chapter about the meaning of place after the disaster and the way that residents and responders mutually constructed a collective sense of place in the village of Toll Bar in 2007. It is a discussion of the heterogeneous network of physical structures and human actors that entwined in the village in the years following the floods. It is about the role that places and spaces play in recovering but also how vulnerable they can be.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Again, the use of the term ‘cells’ is an application of military lexicon to a civilian setting.
- 2.
There are potentially multiple realisations and multiple failings here; technologies such as an engineering system that has caused the emergency may have failed; the plan for before the emergency may have failed and then the technologies of recovery may fail!
- 3.
An electronic key that provides Internet access.
- 4.
In June 2008, The Sun national newspaper ran an article about Toll Bar titled “The Tide has Turned” (Phillips 2008). Here it described, in a subheading, the way that “neighbours forge ties in town rebuilt after flood” and quoted the head teacher of the primary school saying that “As a community, it was always good. The last year has shown it has got heart”.
- 5.
A number of participatory studies were initiated after the floods across parts of the UK in 2007 and also in Carlisle in 2005. Several of these included analysis of the way in which the damage and disruption to homes is particularly traumatic. See, for example, Sims et al. (2009) and Carroll et al. (2009).
- 6.
I recognise ambivalence here as for many people a house where they live may not be a place of sanctuary but of fear, violence or poverty.
- 7.
I cannot be sure that every resident wanted the caravan park.
- 8.
A number of women that I got to know during the fieldwork discussed with me the way in which they felt that the floods had given them back their voices or even a new identity. On one occasion, a woman who gave me a personal archive of material that she had collected stated “I’m a historian now”. Another woman described to me how she had been agoraphobic before the floods, but the floodwater had forced her to leave her home. After spending time in the rest centres, she became engaged with the local responders and became a volunteer in a number of community projects.
- 9.
At a research workshop into community resilience after flooding organised by the Cabinet Office and partner organisations, in November 2011, one of the workshop headings was “the pub as a hub” to allow exploration of this theme.
- 10.
The assistance centre for those affected by the 7 July 2005 terrorist attacks was housed in the Royal Horticultural Halls in the centre of London.
- 11.
I found the work of Doreen Massey useful here with regard to how places may be gendered and the way in which women tend to lead “more local lives” than men (1994: 9).
- 12.
For example, see the special issue of the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disaster (Vol 18: No 1, March 2000) on the Popular Culture of Disasters which dedicates a number of articles to the issue of gender and emergencies.
- 13.
This would therefore suggest that the women’s narratives may therefore be one of the subjugated narratives that I discussed in Chapter 3.
- 14.
All of the Doncaster Emergency Planning Team are women, and the majority of the Neighbourhood Management Team were women.
- 15.
Men, both residents and responders, did on occasions attend the ‘One O’Clock Club’ but they were in a minority. This did not appear to be an explicit decision or exclusion, but the small number of men involved may possibly have acted as a deterrent to others. A number of men did, however, get involved with the community garden as the photograph below illustrates.
- 16.
I learnt to emulate this approach in my own ethnographic style. On some visits, I never even discussed the floods but would instead talk about my family life or some issue in the news or Daniel Craig as the new James Bond.
- 17.
‘A Grass’ is a colloquial term for somebody who informs on other members of the community to the police (e.g. for a crime) or to the local council (e.g. for benefit fraud).
- 18.
A resident said to me, when I asked about a visit to the Support Centre: People don’t think we are grassing any more. I will come back here (Field notes, April 2008).
- 19.
An electronic key that provides Internet access.
- 20.
In June 2008, The Sun newspaper also published a two page spread on life in Toll Bar a year after the flooding. The headline was ‘Crime drops and neighbours forge ties in town rebuilt after flood’.
References
Academy for Community Leadership (ACL). (2008). Toll Bar on Sea. Published by Toll Bar Forum in Association with Pontefract Press [A collection of the testimonies of Toll Bar residents collected in 2007 immediately after the floods].
Audit Commission. (2008). Neighbourhood Management: Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council. August.
BBC. (2007, September 10). Flood Victims’ Caravan Park Opens. Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire/6986624.stm as at December 1, 2009.
Bijker, W., & Law, J. (1992). Shaping Technology/Building Society. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Cabinet Office. (2007). National Recovery Guidance. http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ukresilience/response/recovery_guidance/generic_issues/structures_processing.aspx as at August 18, 2009.
Carroll, B., Morbey, H., Baolgh, R., & Araoz, G. (2009). Flooded Homes, Broken Bonds, The Meaning of Home, Psychological Processes and Their Impact on Psychological Health in a Disaster. Health and Place, 15, 540–547.
Coates, T. (2010). How Can Local Communities Cope with Flooding? Understanding Local Social Structures and How These Shape Collective Flood Response. In Health Protection Agency, Chemical Hazards and Poisons Report (October, Issue 18). Centre for Radiation, Chemical and Environmental Hazards.
Conradson, D. (2005). Freedom, Space and Perspective: Moving Encounters with Other Ecologies. In J. Davidson, L. Bondi, & M. Smith (Eds.), Emotional Geographies. Hampshire: Ashgate.
Convery, I., Mort, M., Baxter, J., & Bailey, C. (2008). Animal Disease and Human Trauma. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Davis, I. (1978). Shelter After Disaster. Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press.
Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council (DMBC). (2008). Neighbourhood Management Team Data—Notes (Unpublished).
Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council (DMBC). (2012). Greater Bentley Ward Area. http://www.doncaster.gov.uk/Community_and_Living/Neighbourhoods/Communities/Greater_Bentley/Greater_Bentley.asp as at June 1, 2012.
Enarson, E. (2000). We Will Make Meaning Out of This: Women’s Cultural Responses to the Red River Valley Flood. International Journal of Emergency Management, 18(1), 39–62.
Erikson, K. (1976). Everything in Its Path. London: Simon & Schuster.
Eyre, A. (2007, December 14). Family First. Police Review, pp. 28–31.
Fordham, M. (1998). Making Women Visible in Disasters: Problematising the Private Domain. Disasters, 22(2), 126–143.
Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Phillips, M. (2008, June 25). The Tide has Turned. The Sun Newspaper, pp. 30–31.
Sims, R., Medd, W., Mort, M., & Twigger- Ross, C. (2009). When a ‘Home’ Becomes a ‘House’ Care and Caring in the Flood Recovery Process. Space and Culture, 12, 303–316.
Szerszynski, B., Wallace, H., & Waterton, C. (Eds.). (2003). Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Easthope, L. (2018). Lifescapes in Recovery. In: The Recovery Myth . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74555-8_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74555-8_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74554-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74555-8
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)