The City Speaks: Urban Storytelling for Planning

Cities are full of stories, and that these stories lay a strong foundation for understanding the historic nature of the city, its original functions and act as catalysts to take a leap into the future. Urban Storytelling brings a connection to the things that are remote in space and time.

I was always curious about cities and came across multitude of stories that affected me in a way to learn more. These are about their past, present and future - tales of glory, origin and newborn.

Having an outlook of Urban Planning and the craving for amusing Stories have pushed me to write about Urban + Storytelling together.

We all know urbanization drives cities towards growth, and narratives are useful to ensure merging of growing population in a rational manner. Basically, participatory approach!

A catching and convincing story aids in better advocacy of goals for planned development. It may also be stated that city stories have a major role in generating awareness, which is crucial for effective citizen engagement.

Utilizing the power of work that stories do, we can make better planners in various ways, as it sharpens our critical decision making and widens the opportunities of public participation.

Origin of Thoughts:

- From the history of humankind, stories have played a significant role in bringing about cognitive revolution.

- If we see the history of cities too, stories have helped in guiding major social and physical changes when it was in inception stage.

- Even Homo Sapiens would not have been able to build their kingdoms and empires if it were not being driven by stories around and adopting the dominant culture thereby.

And therefore, persuasive and intriguing stories have a better chance of framing our minds and lead to actions of desired nature. It is this power of stories to affect our collective imagination that has brought us to the present that we live in, while using past narratives as our guiding lights.

It is also evident from the quote as given by Yuval Noah Harari in his recent book Sapiens:

“Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.” (Harari, 2015)

Similarly, narratives have helped in creating a paradigm shift in the planning practice by making it more inclusive and collaborative.

It can be also be understood from the history of cities that the reconfiguration of cities have been influenced by narrative approach of decision making as quoted below:

“If good planning is persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the future, then it follows that good planning history is persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the past.” (Throgmorton, 1996)

Above quote is taken from a very interesting book that you can check out :

A very interesting story in this one. do read!

With this line of reasoning, we will now try to understand the role that stories play in the public domain for guided and informed decisions towards urban development.

Storytelling for Urban Planning

The success of any urbanist strategy is directly influenced by the way in which it is communicated with people so that they become aware of the goals of land use plans while having a clear and resonant image of the ideas put forth within a plan.

Domain of a Planner

We can see that the planners have to interact with the advocates, scientists and politicians to reach to a comprehensive solution for an urban issue. Here is the origin of advocate planners, policy analysts and political entrepreneurs.

The objective of the planner’s narrative thus has to be inclusive of the advocacy of goals, comprising of data analytics’ representation and consideration of the political inclination.

Thus planners’ job becomes multifaceted with an ultimate objective of using the power of persuasive and constitutive storytelling to mediate, propose and execute the recommended changes that has to be incorporated within the plan and bring them into the daylight.

In this way, planners can be regarded as authors who write future-oriented texts (plans, analyses, articles) that reflect awareness of differing or opposing views and that can be read (constructed and interpreted) in diverse and often conflicting ways.

Also, it can be stated that the effective citizen engagement is directly proportional to the level of understanding and favorable response to the strategies mentioned in the plans. The resolution of conflicts can be achieved by proper advocacy of the most sustainable plan amongst various options.

It becomes suitable here to state the concept of pluralism in plan making process.

Pluralism of plans can be thought of as multiple number of plans for a particular intended state of development.

For example, a neighborhood plan can be selected out of many proposed plans under various guiding principles of planning but the ultimate one being the best advocated and a sustainable one. Once it is chosen, it has to be communicated in the form of a dialogue with the community for which it is planned in the first place.

The experiences during the preparation of plans and policies create a possibility for a future narrative to take shape, which in turn can help future planners to find it as a reference story. Thus, there can be various forms of storytelling too, which appear in various stages of plan implementation - for the qualified urban planners as well as for the citizens.

The planning profession must engage itself thoroughly and openly in the contention surrounding political discourse.

Moreover advocacy in planning should be there so that the planner must be able to engage in political process as advocates of the interests both of government and of such other group, organization, individuals who are concerned with proposing policies for the future development of the community.

The planning process is to encourage democracy in the urban scenario, so that it operates for inclusivity rather than to exclude citizens from participating in the process of development.

The importance of a successful dialogue lies in creating the shared understanding of goals and the confidence of getting it executed as per the planned proposals. Once it is created, there is a common language between the planners and the public.

Working towards the plan execution in such a scenario is favorable and deemed to be most successful. Having said that, we must also recognize the importance of language of communication during this process.

On one side, where planners keep the ideas of advocacy, scientific details and political influence, they must also be able to speak the language of audiences of various level of perception.

In the absence of retrieval of relevant details of the plan, it may fail even if it is intended for the welfare of the stakeholders. Thus, planners should not only be technically effective in plan making but also effective in communicating it to the target audiences suitably.

Storytelling is one of the persuasive medium of achieving this goal in one form or another, which enables planners to create a futuristic picture supported by technical details of past experiences, developments and stories.

Considering the above discussion, it is worthy of saying that the planners should have a collaborative and communicative approach that will enable them to create sustainable communities for equitable development of urban areas.

Urban Storytelling in Practice

Case 1: Slum Dwellers International

Slum Dwellers International (SDI) is a network of community-based organizations of the urban poor in 33 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

It was launched in 1996, when federations of the urban poor in countries such as India and South Africa agreed that a global platform could help their local initiatives develop alternatives to evictions while also influencing the global agenda for urban development.

In each country where federations operate, they mobilize around core SDI practices and principles to build a voice and collective capacity in urban poor communities. This is SDI’s Know Your Community work.

Organized federations throughout the SDI network profile, map and enumerate their settlements to gather invaluable planning data and catalyze community action and partnerships. SDI’s Know Your City website combines hard data and rich stories from urban poor communities in 224 cities across the Global South.

Federations use their data and collective capacity to co-produce solutions for slum upgrading. These projects make up the third category of SDI’s work – Improve Your City.

Communities use their collective savings to access funds from SDI and qualifies for subsidized loans. To assess the contemporary scenario, socioeconomic surveys are conducted; mapping and collection of data is carried out for accessibility to basic services by SDI members.

The network also helps people from different poor cities to renovate their homes, their cities, and, eventually, their own lives. All the information gathered regarding the conditions of the slums is presented on the website in the form of infographics, maps, and diagrams for visitors to learn how things are at the moment.

Case 2: Citiscope

Citiscope is a platform that publishes materials presented by a variety of independent journalists that want to tell specific stories related to urban issues locally and globally. The platform has also been aligned with thisisplace.

They can submit their stories about certain urban events and happenings, that they consider relevant towards a positive transformation of the cities under the age of rapid urbanization.

Through this platform, new innovations from the neighborhoods across various communities can be outsourced from the local level to global level for sharing the lessons learned and in a documented form. The audiences or the readers may include city thinkers, urban enthusiasts, planners, activists and scholars all around the world.

Journalists who are writing for the cities are encouraged to pen down their stories about what they have witnessed in various communities by pointing out their major observations and communicate it for the citizens’ benefits thereby.

Case 3: Urban Stories Festival

Urban Stories Festival was organized with the intention of spreading awareness about the dynamics of events occurring within the cities at global level and thus promote urban journalism. It's a multi-day storytelling festival that you can get to know about.

It was also created because the journalists can also contribute to what impact urban journalism can have on the actual state of things for contemporary urban happenings.

Case 4: Future Cities

Future Cities is a transmedia project by Oscar Boyson, based on the data collection of various urban issues in multiple cities and documenting the urban stories that have initiated local level reforms for solving issues and also adopting the approaches of futuristic nature.

It takes into consideration, the case of cities like Songdo, Singapore, Mumbai, and Tokyo etc. to sensitive about their best practices through visual media and the documentary by the same name is also made available on YouTube.

The contrast between these narratives are thought provoking and can be taken as reference for cities of same scale in other parts of the world. Stories of various cities have been told about their best practices including the critique on Smart Cities.

Boyson discussed the way ahead for future urbanisation that can be projected by going through the current conditions of these cities.

For example,

1 - the city water app being developed in Detroit for addressing the challenge of water shortage by citizen engagement;

2 - lessons from innovative practices in water management from Los Angeles considering the fact that cities aren't just composed of buildings, but an organism having an interaction between buildings and people;

3 - cases of Shanghai where highways are provided with green public spaces promoting community gatherings;

4 - cycling and pedestrianization from New York;

5 - public housing mechanism for almost 80% of the residents in Singapore;

6- approaches of listening to people for development within the slums via a case of Slum Dwellers International;

7 - incorporating bicycle infrastructure for mobility in Copenhagen to bring a citizen driven change, and a ski slope over a waste treatment plant.

Considering all these cases, one must understand the issues of cities and how a documentary can be one of the potential medium for city based reforms towards urban management.

Conclusion

So it may be concluded that the stories form an essential part of planning process at various stages of its development through various actors like advocates, scientists, politicians, citizens, etc. to bring about a rational comprehensive solution for urban issues.

Inclusion of citizens does not mean only permitting them to hear, but it also means allowing them to become well informed about the underlying reason for preparing the planning proposals, and to respond in a technical language of professional planner.

In addition to that, persuasive storytelling becomes an important skill that planners must possess and utilize it for the betterment of communities as well as the associated stakeholders.

It can be supported by the following quote:

“Growing urban population in a global world means often also growing diversity, and this too asks for new stories of what kind of place the city is and who is it for.” (Väänänen, 2016)

It won't be exaggerating to express here that urban stories and their expressions create a unique picture and have a profound impact on the future of cities.

Hence, with the development of various paradigms in planning, the role of urban storytelling becomes quite evident towards the successful implementation of planning proposals by creating a successful dialogue between the planners and the intended audiences at various stages of its execution.

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Ankur Yadav, Author

I am an Engineer-Planner, currently pursuing PhD from IIT Bombay. Most of the time, I write for research and in my free time, there is an expression of poetry and storytelling.

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