Urban planning and storytelling
- 1. URBAN PLANNING: AN ACT OF PERSUASIVE STORYTELLING
- 2. WHAT ARE NARRATIVES? Express subjective and symbolic meaning, and connect it with real identities Enhance our ability to engage multiple voices Enable self-organizing processes
- 3. WHY ENGAGE COMMUNITIES THROUGH STORYTELLING? Through the crafting of narratives, storytelling allows diverse players to find common threads that bind them to a shared vision or allows opposing parties to begin to work out catharsis and healing. To understand the problems that beleaguer a place and identify potential resolutions, we have to study emplotment.
- 4. WHEN IS STORYTELLING USEFULL? To identify stakeholders To understand a community’s foundational narrative to facilitate stakeholder-based collaboration, promote trust and empathy, an understanding of interdependencies
- 5. WHO TO USE IT WITH? “If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.” J. Steinbeck Must be adapted to the audience Very effective with people from strong oral cultures (example: indigenous people, African immigrants, …)
- 6. HOW CAN WE ENGAGE COMMUNITIES THROUGH STORYTELLING? Planning is less about authoritative guidance and more of a means for communities to take turns creating and retelling partially shared stories and weaving together a collective life out of their authentic lived experience (Lejano and Wessells, 2006). narrative approaches underlie various methods that may be useful in community engagement, (e.g., narrative ethnographies for evaluation) as well as various newmedia tools (e.g., digital storytelling, scenario development, computer game storyboarding) and experiential tools (planning for neighborhood, walking tour,…) that may prove valuable in the community engagement process.
- 7. SOURCES • http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context= durp_faculty_publications • http://ancommunity.wordpress.com/meetings/proposed-schedule-odj/ • http://persuasivestorytelling.wordpress.com/ • http://eprints.qut.edu.au/8813/1/8813.pdf
Editor's Notes
- #3: A narrative is “inter-subjective as well as communicative, since the plot renders meaning to specific experiences or logical deductions. It is also a powerful means of communicating an argument” The story can invoke a shared past as well as an imagined future, “not just to talk about what is, but also what ought to be”. For example, the project of neighborhood planning created an experiential narrative
- #4: envisioning healthy, vibrant communities, quest for resilience Emplotment: the way that diverse characters and events are tied into a coherent logical or temporal thread that makes sense to those who are also part of the story (Lejano et al. 2012). Elements of emplotment include: who tells the story and what is its plot, the central characters in the story, moral themes and lessons, and coherence of its central logic.
- #5: Resolve tensions by enabling people to tell stories of what change means to them and how they need to change. Emphasize the potential of collaborative practices. Factors that alienate and divide can be traced to flaws in a community’s foundational narrative.
- #7: Ex: Kok and van Delden (2004) combined narratives and quantitative models in building scenarios to combat the desertification of Spain. They ran a series of workshops with a variety of stakeholders to build a number of narrative scenarios (e.g., convulsive change, water shortage etc.). Actual variables that could be measured were then derived from these scenarios and quantitative modelling undertaken to inform decision making about land use