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Engaging young citizens with drought risk and positive water behaviours is essential in domestic water demand management within the wider climate crisis. This paper evaluates a new research-informed, picture book—‘DRY: The Diary of a Water Superhero’—that explores UK drought. The book’s development was underpinned by research within the Drought Risk and You (DRY) project. The book’s concept and storyline were co-produced by an interdisciplinary team, including a creative practitioner. This focused on key themes: drought definitions and types, drought myths, adaptation and young people’s (YP) agency. Characters and storyline were co-created to promote YP’s autonomy as change agents, and to encourage intergenerational and community learning. This paper evaluates the book from three perspectives: of YP, trainee teachers (TT) and teachers. Emergent themes are triangulated: drought as a sensitive issue, subject knowledge and changes in behaviour, and YP’s misconceptions about drought and place. TT also contemplated their improved subject knowledge and barriers to engaging with positive water behaviours. Teachers reflected on classroom use of the book, prior experiences about teaching drought, curriculum context and st/age of YP engaged. This paper reflects on how these insights feed into school practice and water industry outreach, in developing effective learning resources that promote a valuing of water, behaviour change and wider hydrocitizenship among YP and their communities.

Framed by questions about ‘hydrocitizenship’ in the 21st century, this co-produced, interdisciplinary arts and humanities-centred research explores the (re)weaving of local knowledges, experiences, perceptions and values of water and place through the concept, process and practice of ‘daylighting hidden rivers’. Located at the nexus of three theoretical frames – ‘participation’, ‘hydrocitizenship’, and ‘daylighting’, it engages reflexively with strong and weak ‘hydrocitizenship’ and with paradigms of ‘daylighting’. Working with diverse communities and organisations in South Bristol (UK), this eco-social research project discovered community concerns and needs, and positioned itself in relation to these in co-production. This involved older people, children and professional stakeholders in a place-specific, ‘catchment’ setting, using novel arts-led, creative, narrative mapping processes. We critically examined the value, opportunities and tensions of this multi-method approach to people’s past, present and future connections and relationships with their local (water) environment, their senses of self and community. Our iterative processes of seeking out ‘lesser heard’ voices were conceived and played out around a braided cascade of ‘openings’: emerging, connecting, enacting, imagining and reflecting. Thinking critically about our oblique, emergent processes, we identify fifteen ‘top tips’ concerning the creative participatory daylighting of lay knowledges and values, and ‘River Visioning’. These can inform co-working with communities to enable and empower citizen engagement with places and local water issues for resilient futures. Our findings contribute new understandings of ‘hydrocitizenship’ and creative participatory ‘daylighting’ in combination, when urban spaces are construed as ‘Water Cities’, cascading both water and narratives. Importantly, our co-production processes with lesser heard groups also exemplify ‘higher-order participation’ in co-visioning resilient futures, with all the messiness, complexity and conflicts exposed.

This chapter offers a creative, exploratory, non-representational ecology of narratives about water and sound. Water is, clearly, vital to life. It is present in the world in an abundance of seepings, percolations, flows, evaporations, precipitations etc. This fluid profusion is enabled by water’s liminality and loose materiality, and consequential response to pulls of gravity, surface tension, wind, and so on. Water is present on the earth in many natural ‘bodies’ - oceans, seas, rivers, streams, lakes, ponds etc., but also via many techno-cultural forms, such as drinking, waste and irrigation, fountains, swimming pools, and combinations thereof. Water dissolves other compounds, carries material as it flows; it mixes, joins, assembles and disassembles. Sites such as bodies, cities, houses, stand within and between inter-woven networks of such flows. These sites are soundscapes as well as landscapes. To human ears and minds, flowing, or moving, bodies of waters ‘sound’, i.e. they make noises, and can be said to have ‘voices’. Here the authors draw upon a selection of projects dealing with conversations with water and hydrocitizenship.