MAGIC

What is MAGIC?

‘Mobilising Adaptation: Governance of Infrastructure through Co production’ (MAGIC) was a 30 month project trialling new ways of managing surface water in our urban areas whilst also making them more healthy places. MAGIC ran from 2020-2022 and was funded by the UK Research and Innovation’s Strategic Priority Fund for Climate Resilience (Grant no NE/T01394X/1). It focused on case studies around the flood-vulnerable city of Hull.

What did the project do?

Rain tanks and rain garden planters are a type of small-scale ‘Sustainable Drainage System’ (known as SuDS). The MAGIC project worked alongside communities in Hull to install SuDS on well-known buildings used by the public in five neighbourhoods. The project was built on the hope that these installations would inspire local people to find out more about working with rainwater, potentially deciding to slow the flow of rain in their own gardens. 

In addition to our work finding out about community SuDS by doing them, MAGIC has also conducted research into SuDS in the UK.  You can read more about what we found out by talking to developers and policy makers in the ‘What has the MAGIC project found out?” section below. 

Where are the installations?

The MAGIC project has been engaging with the local community in Hull to design Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) on a series of well-known buildings. The project facilitated the installation of small-scale SuDS on:

• Priory Baptist Church, Derringham

• Bilton Community Primary School

• Sewells Garage, Chanterlands Avenue

• Cottingham Civic Hall

• Thorpes Resource Centre, Orchard Park

We worked with the TimeBank Hull and East Riding to support the creation of a new workers cooperative specialising in small scale SuDS design and installation. This cooperative, Susdrainable, carried out the work on four of the five sites. A Sheffield-based social enterprise called Green Estate managed the fifth installation at Bilton Primary School. 

What did you do at each site?

Priory Baptist Church

Having worked with the Derringham community on the MOCA project, we were delighted to continue collaborating via MAGIC. At the Baptist Church, Susdrainable installed 3 rainwater tanks gracefully disguised as planters and a bin shelter with a green roof. The tanks enable 990l of rainwater to be stored. In addition to the SuDS, we supported the community to replenish their raised beds, planting flowers that suit the light conditions, attract pollinators, and return year on year. We were grateful to discover a local plant nursery and social enterprise, Myers Beck, where we sourced the plants and peat-free soil for the installation and a beautiful, handmade bug hotel. The bin shelter was created using reclaimed pallet wood from a local charity, Humber Wood Recycling Project.

Bilton Primary School

We worked with Sheffield-based social enterprise, Green Estate, to create an outdoor classroom on the school grounds. A large pond acts as the centrepiece of the space. Ponds create extra space for rainwater, as well as a home for wildlife like frogs, dragonflies, ducks and newts. When ponds are only partially lined, water can soak away slowly through the soil. The pond features a shallow outlet swale which carries excess rainwater to a nearby, existing dyke. This prevents water from overflowing into the surrounding area during very heavy rain. There is future potential to redirect rainwater from the school roof into the pond once its natural level has been established. The outdoor classroom has been planted with wildflowers, shrubs and trees. Plants and trees collect and hold back rainwater, and roots improve drainage by creating passageways in the soil where water can flow more easily.

Sewells Garage

At Sewells garage we worked with Susdrainable to install rainwater tanks disguised as planters. Together they hold 3,178 litres of rainwater from the garage roof. The planters were created using existing scaffold boards already on-site and filled with low maintenance and some sweet smelling plants including lavender and rosemary. A local artist, Emma Garness, created a beautiful mural as the backdrop of the installation, to help create a beautiful space where people might like to stop a moment. The mural features mermaids from a nearby water feature and a centrepiece of amulets requested by the shopkeepers of Chanterlands Avenue.

Cottingham Civic Hall

We collaborated with Susdrainable to design and install 3 rain garden planters and 3 disguised raintanks at the Cottingham Civic Hall and nearby Memorial Garden. The tanks are cladded with wood and together store 2600 litres of rainwater from the building roofs. The rain garden planters are also connected to the downpipes of the building, slowing the flow of rainwater to drains rather than creating space to contain it. They are filled with plants that are tolerant to both wet and dry conditions, as this will vary with the seasons.

Thorpes Resource Centre

At the Thorpes Resource Centre we worked alongside Susdrainable once again to install rain garden planters and hidden rain tanks. This time we linked the two together, creating a self regulating system where each rain tanks collects rainwater from the roof before overflowing into a rain garden planter. Plants enjoy the rainwater and slow its flow to the drains. Together the rain tanks can store 990 litres of water from the building roof. The stored water can be used to nourish plants during the drier summer months. In addition to the installation, we invited Emma Garness to create another mural featuring flowers and involving local people. Emma worked with the local youth centre, St Michael’s, to spray paint bright feature walls along the fencing. We also collaborated with the youth centre to host two gatherings to plant apple, plum and cherry trees in the car park with local young people and their families.

How did you engage the community?

What did you find out?

… About housebuilders?

One part of the project talked to new developers about when and whether they fit SuDS in their new developments.  The headline findings of the work were that while housebuilders were happy to fit SuDS in new developments they wanted rules that created a level playing field so that every developer was faced with the same constraints.   They faced the difficulty that landowners selling land often did not understand that developers would lose plots and profit from the requirement to fit SuDS.  

Notably, SuDS within domestic housing plots like rain tanks or rain gardens within a domestic garden were not seen as fulfilling the regulatory requirements to reduce the flows of water to the sewer.  This was because it could not be guaranteed that the use continued.  Hence were not usually fitted.  

Housebuilders recognised the SuDS could be part of delivering other requirements like biodiversity net gain, and recommended that in future each site allocated to housing in a local plan should come accompanied by a blue-green plan, specifying the proportion of the site to be allocated to blue and green features. 

The report is still being completed, but once ready it will be available here. 

… About the policy environment for community involvement in Flood Resilience?

One of our work packages explored how resilience and adaptation work, in particular community-based SuDs, played out in practices of professionals both involved in making and implementing flood risk management practices. The National Erosion and Risk Management Strategy for England emphasises the role that local people and partners can play in supporting flood resilience (2020: 47). In light of this, we conducted interviews with professionals involved in policy making and implementation by looking at how they understood and approached flood resilience and water management in relation to SuDS and community co-design, for instance, in practices of evaluation and evidence making. 

 We found that professionals described a shift in flood management practices from a focus on physical infrastructures and initiatives towards people centred practices. Doing community engagement as part of community-based SuDs was one such initiative. This shift was not straight forward and certain tensions existed. For example, those professionals doing flood risk management had difficulty translating local knowledge that emerged from community engagement into ‘data’ that was generalisable and accepted as evidence by policy actors to attain funding. This tension between qualitative and quantitative methods to provide demonstrable evidence of community engagement emerged as a central theme. So too was the tension between the time it took to carry out community engagement according to work constraints. This resulted in an experience of community engagement by some as inadequate. For example, we found that projects do not always last long enough to build trust and shared aims, and often resulted in people feeling like they were not genuinely involved or listened to. Moreover, that the work of adaptation and resilience was not being asked of the people and practices who cause the problems in the first place. This research package therefore provides a glimpse into the challenges faced by professionals and communities to generate new practices whilst working within existing systems and constraints.