Civic Care in Place: Subtle Technologies and Community Stewardship in a Marginalised Context

· Civic care often takes subtle, relational forms embedded in everyday routines.

· Small acts of maintenance and neighbourliness quietly uphold resilience under conditions of neglect.

· Designing with care means amplifying community capacity rather than replacing it.

· Collaborative, open, and international research strengthens both learning and local impact.

Environmental risks and infrastructural neglect often fall hardest on communities already living with economic and social precarity. In these contexts, care for the environment and for one another frequently takes modest, everyday forms: sweeping drains, planting flowers, or checking in after heavy rain. Such acts rarely appear in official participation data, yet they are vital for sustaining social and environmental wellbeing.

Our project in Stanley, County Durham explores these quiet forms of informal civic care: the subtle, often reactive practices that emerge when formal systems of maintenance and governance fail to reach everyday life. Stanley, County Durham is a post-industrial community historically shaped by coal mining, labour activism, and cycles of disinvestment. Today, residents face recurring flood risks, ageing drainage systems, and low institutional trust, compounded by wider socio-economic pressures such as the ongoing cost-of-living crisis.

In partnership with Wear Rivers Trust, a regional charity advancing Nature-based Solutions (NbS) for flood management, and SuDS+ Governmental Defra funded programme we examined how residents perceive and practise care under these conditions. The NGO’s work, installing Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) and restoring local habitats, depends not only on technical success but also on community stewardship. This partnership offered a unique opportunity to study how everyday, often unnoticed acts of care intersect with broader infrastructures of environmental resilience.

Over the course of a year, our mixed-methods study combined:

A survey of 140 residents exploring perceptions of flooding, responsibility, and local engagement;
Interviews with volunteers involved in NbS activities, focusing on motivations, challenges, and community identity;
A diary study capturing everyday moments of care, environmental and interpersonal, across time and place.

Through this work, we found that small, often unnoticed acts; like checking drainage after storms or sharing advice with neighbours, quietly uphold the town’s adaptive capacity. Yet they also reveal tensions: frustration at institutional neglect, uncertainty about responsibility, and fatigue from sustained self-reliance.

Rather than viewing these gestures as peripheral, we frame them as civic care - a form of participation grounded in emotion, negotiation, and place. This perspective challenges conventional views of volunteering or engagement by recognising that care itself is infrastructural.

Collaboration and Learning

This project also included part of the International Research Experiences for Students (IRES) programme, which brought four visiting students from the United States to work with the research team at Northumbria University, Newcastle for three months. The students received training in thematic analysis, field studies, and qualitative research methods, contributing to interviews, analysis, and community engagement.

Their reflections and a project summary were published on SuDS+ website, helping to share learning between academic, community, and policy audiences. This exchange fostered mutual benefit: students gained experience in community-engaged environmental research, while residents and the charity benefitted from sustained dialogue and documentation of local practices of care.

This collaborative effort involves:
Anna R. L. Carter, Centre for Digital Citizens, Northumbria University;
Eleanor Starkey, Defra-funded SuDS+ Project, Northumbria University;
Austin Toombs, Co-PI of the IRES Scheme, Indiana University, Bloomington;
Mark Davinson, Wear Rivers Trust, Stanley; and IRES students Chukwubunkem Okezie (Macalester College, Minnesota), Sarah Braunstein (Indiana University, Bloomington), Thomas E. Fenno (University of Utah, Salt Lake City), and Isabel Edwards (Beloit College, Wisconsin).

Impact

Open Access Dataset: A publicly available qualitative dataset supporting further research on civic care, participation, and environmental stewardship.
- Carter, Anna; Starkey, Eleanor (2025). Resident Perceptions of Flood Risk, Civic Responsibility, and Community Action: Pre-Intervention Survey Dataset. Northumbria University. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.25398/rd.northumbria.30272140.v1
Two co-created booklets with accompanying videos to share our research with the community.
- Diary Study Themes: Highlights everyday acts of civic care-checking drains, supporting neighbours, maintaining green spaces-through themes like Flood Risk, Civic Responsibility, Community Action, and Citizen Engagement. It shows how small, daily practices help build resilience in flood-prone communities.

Survey Overview: Summarises findings from 140 residents on flooding, responsibility, and attitudes toward Nature-based Solutions (NbS) and urban resilience.

Building on this collaboration, Dr Anna R. L. Carter received International Research Collaboration Grant from the Royal Society to explore civic care and to establish new international research partnerships with Dr Austin Toombs and colleagues at Indiana University.