Developing social and cultural dealings with floods

Confronted with the unrecognised hazard of living by the sea and the following risk of storm surge flooding the citizens of Jyllinge Nordmark in Roskilde Municipality, Denmark, have, through repeated events over a time span of a few years developed social ways of dealing with floods despite being “storm surge debutants”. This includes different forms of emergent volunteerism (Whittaker, McLennan, & Handmer, 2015) which has contributed to an accumulation of experience and development of competences in relation to dealing with storm surge events. These include actual mitigation and preparedness activities in relation to floods, boundary spanning interaction with authorities (Johansson, Danielsson, Kvarnlöf, Eriksson, & Karlsson, 2018) leading to their involvement in rather than exclusion from official response measures (Harris, Shaw, Scully, Smith, & Hieke, 2017) and also different ways of supporting these activities by both individual citizens, civil society organisations and local commerce. The latter includes donations in kind, volunteering of labour, emerging citizen preparedness organisation and ways of dealing with worries and distress using both well-known institutions such as the church and contemporary ways of interacting such as social media. However, there is also a counter-culture of conflict with authorities. While some formal and informal leaders in the community speaks for the cooperation with authorities, there are also citizen groups who argue that the authorities are not living up to their responsibility and following an agenda of demanding what they feel entitled to, and disowning the cooperative approach.