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