Living Lab Northern Rivers: A Case Study in Recovery Planning Co-design

With more extreme climate events happening across the globe, what roles can designers and planners play in supporting community-driven recovery? How should the processing of grief and loss inform the co-design process? What does ethical recovery look like when building back is not a viable option? How can creativity be woven into processes of building adaptive capacity while recovery is ongoing? Living Lab Northern Rivers is an extraordinary and award-winning example of what is possible when a network of local knowledge holders and designers with recovery experience use co-design to develop action-oriented answers to these pressing questions.

In the aftermath of wildfires and then a catastrophic flood, the New South Wales government knew it needed more innovative modes of adaptation planning and design for post-disaster recovery. The Northern Rivers Region is blessed with incredible natural and cultural assets, and its residents value their community in ways that do not align with traditional hazard risk assessment calculations. Local and Indigenous Knowledge is plentiful, while trust in the government is not. Community members stepped up to rescue one another during the floods and the lack of government support in those efforts further exacerbated that already strained relationship.

Living Lab Northern Rivers (LLNR) is an inventive organizational model built in response to this need for new adaptation paradigms and practices by a team of design academics and practitioners with both deep local networks and considerable expertise in post-disaster design and planning. Birthed via an agreement with the New South Wales government that this team would not follow typical adaptation planning practices, LLNR illustrates both the opportunities and the challenges of innovating alongside traditional government processes. The work is ongoing, but several years of exemplary effort make this case a model for what communities and co-designers can do together when they agree that local adaptation relies on community knowledge and transformative recovery planning should center community values. 

Because LLNR team is still working tirelessly to support the Northern Rivers recovery, we decided to craft the images in this case study together as an embodiment of the principles of co-design, out of respect for their design intellect, and to ensure they were reflective of their rich network and ethics. As the author of the written portion of this case, I would like to express deep gratitude to the LLNR team for their collaboration, all the leaders and residents in NSW who sat for interviews and gave feedback on the draft, and my very talented colleague Daniel Carmelo for learning alongside us and iterating the graphics into something beautiful and unique to this project.