The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning

Plotting the Helsinki Waterfront

Lieven Ameel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000221633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Narratives, in the context of urban planning, matter profoundly. Planning theory and practice have taken an increasing interest in the role and power of narrative, and yet there is no comprehensive study of how narrative, and concepts from narrative and literary theory more broadly, can enrich planning and policy.

The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning addresses this gap by defining key concepts such as story, narrative, and plot against a planning backdrop, and by drawing up a functional typology of different planning narratives. In two extended case studies from the planning of the Helsinki waterfront, it applies the narrative concepts and theories to a broad range of texts and practices, considering ways toward a more conscious and contextualized future urban planning. Questioning what is meant when we speak of narratives in urban planning, and what typologies we can draw up, it presents a threefold taxonomy of narratives within a planning framework.

This book will serve as an important reference text for upper-level students and researchers interested in urban planning.

1 Introduction

Examining narratives in the context of urban planning

Narratives matter

Narratives, in the context of urban planning, matter. This is not a new argument – if anything, it has become something of a commonplace in thinking and writing about the contemporary city. It is implicit in planning theory paradigms such as communicative and discursive planning theory, and is met also in a range of approaches to the city as diverse as urban history, sociology, ethnography, literary urban studies, and human and cultural geography. The narrative view of planning is implicitly founded on the thought, following Henri Lefebvre ([1974] 1991), that space is relative and intersubjective, and it is a view that draws on the long legacy of the linguistic turn in the humanities and social sciences. Cities are, in the words of Doreen Massey, “the intersections of multiple narratives” (Massey 1999, 165), and planning always participates – willingly and consciously, or not – in the formation of these intersections. The interest in urban narratives goes hand in hand with an increasing awareness that urban planning could (and in many countries legally should) take into account experiential, “subjective” place-based information, shared in the stories people and communities tell of their place in the world. As a result of such shifts, and following a range of intertwined paradigmatic turns variously described as “cultural”, “spatial”, “rhetorical”, “communicative”, and “narrative”, planners have emerged during the past decades as producers, curators, and negotiators of diverse narratives, rather than as the descendants of the hero-planners from the modernist era. But the conceptual and methodological apparatus available to planning theorists and practitioners to assess this narrative turn has remained fragmented, unevenly developed, and largely separated from developments within what is arguably its most relevant cognate field: narrative studies.

Little systematic analysis has been carried out to examine the different kinds of narrative that are used in the context of urban planning from a particularly narrative perspective, and, to date, there is no comprehensive study of how narrative – and concepts from narrative and literary theory more broadly – can enrich planning and policy. Although several researchers have noted the existence of a “narrative turn” or a “story turn” in planning, few have found it necessary to problematize the concept of “narrative” in this context. What is meant, exactly, when we speak of narratives in urban planning? How are these narratives defined, and what kinds of typology can we begin to draw up? What is the relationship between such narratives and the built environment? And, starting from there, what methods for analysis and conceptual tools can be applied to examine the production, dissemination, and reception of urban planning narratives? These are the key questions addressed in this book. Directing the focus squarely on examining urban planning in terms of its narrative characteristics, this study gives a key role to methods and concepts from disciplines with long-standing expertise in this respect: literary studies, narratology – the study of narrative – and rhetorics. Narrative is defined here, following James Phelan, as a “rhetorical act: somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” (Phelan 2007, 3–4). What is told is the story, and the telling can be oral as well as in a written form of text. I will return to the definitions of story and narrative, and the extent to which these can be applied to planning, in more detail in the following chapter; for now, this definition will have to suffice.

To put narratives first in a study of urban planning is not to say that this book is not concerned also with the materiality of the actual city. What I hope to elucidate, with an analysis of two specific case studies of urban planning, is the extent to which the actual – planned, built, and lived – city is shaped by narrative structures in planning, and how narrative and the material urban world are part of a firmly intertwined and interactive meshwork of meaning and experience. Narratives that are created, told, and circulated in the context of urban planning eventually turn into the stone, glass, and concrete of the built and lived city; they guide and define the material realities of the city. And the built environment in turn produces its own stories to be retold or contested. An urban redevelopment project that is envisioned in terms of its industrial heritage may result in a preference for a specific urban morphology or building material (such as red bricks to mirror earlier industrial architecture) and in the preservation of specific features of the built environment (such as obsolete tram rails or quay boulders). Certain types of building height, building block structure, and traffic solutions will be preferred, depending on whether a development is presented as part of the storyline of city centre expansion or, conversely, as that of a new garden town that brings nature into the urban fabric. Features of the built environment in their turn produce particular experiences and narratives. An artificially constructed canal may produce stories of division and separation between different parts of the city – or, quite the opposite, it may foster the experience of a recreational space linking these, all depending on a complex combination of often unpredictable factors. The windowed street-level spaces designed by planners for front stores may be used instead for bicycle parking or for community meetings, creating unintended spatial uses that may give rise to a host of narratives of an area’s semi-public spaces.

Following Jonathan Raban, cities are “plastic by nature” and, if we “mould them in our images”, they “in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our personal form on them” (Raban [1974] 1988, 10). Narratives are seen here as drawing on, and producing, such resistance, and as situated on the interstices between city planners, city inhabitants, and the cities they work and live in. But narratives in the context of planning are never natural or self-evident, even when they are presented as evocations of causal or organic relationships. They are also instruments of power, used to legitimize interventions in space, dislocations, and the prioritization of specific interests over others.

Aims

The first aim of this book is to draw up a typology of the kinds of narrative that are found in the context of urban planning, in order to clarify the existing terminological inconsistency in narrative planning theory, and to provide a taxonomy that could be of use for urban planners, planning theorists, and the inhabitants living in the end result of planning efforts, the everyday city. Second, it wants to outline key methodological concepts from literary and narrative studies that are relevant for the analysis of urban planning texts, and to showcase how these can be applied to planning texts and practices. More specifically, I apply a narrative analysis to two areas currently under development in the Finnish capital Helsinki, a city that provides a particularly rich case study for examining narratives and planning. In sum, the aims are both theoretical, in proposing new concepts and approaches to the study of planning theory and urban studies, and applied, in bringing new insights to specific case studies. The final part of this book proposes new approaches not only to the study of planning narratives, but also to planning practices, by examining the concepts of polyphony and the possibility for planning without closure.

This study has the benefit that it can build upon a considerable body of existing scholarly work. Inspiring book-length studies of urban planning from a narrative perspective include the PhD dissertations by Stefan Dormans (Dormans 2008) and Mareile Walter (2013); the seminal study of Milton Keynes by Ruth Finnegan (1998); as well as the studies by James A. Throgmorton (1996) and Bent Flyvbjerg (1998). All of these studies (which will be more fully introduced in the following chapter) draw upon narrative concepts as ancillary methods for use within their own specific disciplines (regional management, planning, anthropology). This is the first book-length study that takes the opposite route and that starts out from a firm basis in narrative and literary studies in order to elucidate how narrative has been used in a context that has traditionally not been associated with literary or narrative theory.¹

When teaching narrative theory to urban studies students who are trained within fields such as architecture, land use, or engineering, I am often asked about the added value of a narrative approach. Why would one need narrative studies if planners, architects, and policymakers can draw on well-established approaches from the social sciences, geography, and architecture? What are the rewards of studying urban planning texts and practices in terms of narrative? A first reward, I would suggest, comes from introducing a measure of clarity in the context of an increasing “storyfication” of planning practices and planning theory. Earlier discussions of narratives in the context of planning have tended to suffer from conceptual unclarity by using terms such as discourse, narrative, story, imaginary, myth, and imagination almost interchangeably. What counts as narrative in the context of planning and policy? What are the minimum requirements to speak of a story? What types of narrative can be discerned in terms of how they function within planning practices? Such questions are not about mere technicalities, but go to the heart of how planning narratives describe cities in order to prescribe city futures, and of how they legitimize particular choices. An examination grounded in narrative studies starts out from formalist aspects in order to be better equipped to move on to questions of context, purpose, and power. How are storylines given persuasive force with the help of specific rhetoric devices? What alternative storylines are hidden behind them? Who is allowed to speak and to act in them? A starting point in narrative and literary theory also has the benefit of being particularly attuned to the historical and cultural connections of the rhetorical tropes and genre conventions that are used in contemporary planning. Literary and narrative studies may in this respect provide a window into the long history of particular cultural tropes used in thinking of cities.

In the background of this book’s thinking on planning narratives is a view of narratives as frames of knowledge that describe reality but that also prescribe how we are able to make sense of reality, and how we are able to frame our possibilities to change the world. Following the now dominant approach in current narrative studies, telling stories is seen as “a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change” (Herman, Jahn, and Ryan 2005, ix), which provides “a major reservoir of the cultural baggage that enables us to make meaning out of a chaotic world and the incomprehensible events taking place in it” (Bal 2002, 10). In recent decades, narrative research based on these assumptions has proliferated across a range of disciplines (see Heinen 2009; Hatavara, Hydén, and Hyvärinen 2013; Nünning, Nünning, and Neumann 2010). In its basic tenets, and especially in how it has been developed in more recent cognitive narratology, this view of narrative has a strong affinity with cognitive frame theory, which posits cognitive frames as “knowledge structures”, used by people on an everyday basis to make sense of information and to translate complex data into meaning-making structures (see e.g. Meyer 2015). Following the publication of Erwin Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974), cognitive frame analysis has rapidly gained ground across a number of disciplines, including regional management and planning. Cognitive frames and scripts crucially orient people towards particular actions (see e.g. Palmer 2004, 47) and towards particular ways of knowledge production. Applying frames to the study of policy and planning, Donald Schön and Martin Rein have pointed out that, “[t]hrough the process of naming and framing, the stories make the ‘normative leap’ from data to recommendation, from fact to values, from ‘is’ to ‘ought’” (as quoted in Gunder 2003, 289). Examples of recurring narrative structures that take on characteristics of normative frames are plot structures such as those of the “reconstitution story” in illness narratives (Frank 1995) or the “monomyth” of the hero’s journey (Campbell 1956), frequently adapted to creative writing and movie scripts. In planning and policy, cognitive frame theory has become one of the ways in which the analysis of narrative structure has been applied to planning (see e.g. Knieling and Othengrafen 2009; Othengrafen [2012] 2016).

In literary and narrative studies, frames have – albeit under different names – long been an object of study, from the “horizon of expectation” in reception studies (Jauss 1982), to the study of rhetoric tropes (see Curtius [1948] 1967), genre conventions, and character prototypes such as the figure of the foundling (see Korthals Altes 2014, 150; Nünning 2008, 48; Ikonen 2010, 202–208). They constitute eminently useful heuristic tools for examining how experience and knowledge take shape in narrative form. From a formal perspective, the most basic frames can be seen as relatively value-free, akin to a toolbox that can be adapted to a range of widely varying purposes. But it could be argued that most, if not all, narrative structures and frames come with some ideological baggage that is hard to cast aside. Specific symbolic structures may be connected to pervasive moral or didactic attributes, or identifiable with specific social, political, scientific, and/or ideological contexts. Examples include the Robinsonade as a genre concomitant with a belief in reason and progress in the context of the Age of Exploration; or the compulsive map-making in much of nineteenth-century prose fiction (including the detective novel and adventure fiction) at a time of colonial expansion; or the classical Bildungsroman and the rise of the bourgeoisie and the nation-state. In addition to these historical genres, such ideologically coloured structures may include powerful and pervasive metanarratives, such as what Michel Serres has called the “Modern Constitution”, the dominant Western metanarrative that determines the relationship between humans and the surrounding world “in terms of mastery and possession” (see Rigby 2014, 212).

Of course, narrative theory cannot be transposed wholesale from the realm of literary theory to the examination of highly stylized policy texts. A commentary on a partial local master plan is no War and Peace, and, when concepts such as narrative “travel” from one research field to another, the way in which they may be used and adapted is far from straightforward (see Hyvärinen 2013). In this study, the focus will be on how narratives in the context of urban planning are structured according to a limited set of narrative forms and strategies that are well established in literary fiction and in narrative studies: metaphor (such as the city as body), genre (such as the Bildungsroman), and the protagonist’s development within the broader outlines of a narrative plot. All three of these narrative forms have implications for assessing the planning narratives discussed here. Metaphorization may underscore the implied logical, “natural”, or necessary nature of a chosen course of action (Throgmorton 1996; Cresswell 1997). The causality implied within a narrative plot may contain reasons for the specific choices made in the planning documents and for the exclusion of others (Healey 1997, 277–278; Westin 2014, 213). Literary genre has been examined repeatedly (although rarely in depth) in studies of urban planning. These range from the treatment of (literary) utopia in planning rhetorics (see e.g. Hall 1989; Rykwert 2000; Pinder 2005), to arguments that modernist planning drew its inspiration from the pastoral (Berman [1982] 1989, 134 ff.), to specific case studies, such as Mar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Examining narratives in the context of urban planning
• 2 Urban planning and narrative: Towards a theory of narrative planning
• 3 Narratives for, in, and of planning
• 4 Emplotting urban regeneration: Narrative strategies in Kalasatama
• 5 Genre and metaphor in planning Jätkäsaari
• 6 Planning with narrative
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Glossary
• Index