Planning as Persuasive Storytelling in a Global-Scale Web of Relationships

Abstract

This article revisits Throgmorton's 1996 claim that planning can be thought of as a form of persuasive storytelling about the future. It responds to three broad lines of critique, connects the claim to contemporary scholarship about `transnational urbanism' and the `network society,' and revises the author's initial claim. This revision suggests that planners should tell future-oriented stories that help people imagine and create sustainable places. It further argues that, to be persuasive to a wide range of readers, planners' stories will have to make narrative and physical space for diverse locally-grounded common urban narratives. It recognizes that powerful actors will strive to eliminate or marginalize competing stories.

‘That eccentric use of land at the top of the hill’: cemeteries and stories of the city

“…The importance of narrative, or storytelling, in place, and planning is well documented (Finnegan, 1998, Throgmorton, 2003, Sandercock, 2003). Finnegan's (1998) Cemetery managers use narratives to situate themselves, and their version of the sites they manage within the city; spatially, practically and culturally, verbally locating cemeteries' role in providing green space, and as an expression of civic identity and local place attachment.…”

“…Storytelling can be a way to bring diverse and divergent views together, but around certain shared normative goals (Sandercock, 2003, Throgmorton, 2003. Planners have a role in interpreting numerous facts and opinions pertaining to their area, articulating these into a coherent narrative vision about a better place, telling a positive tale about the future.…”

“…Planners have a role in interpreting numerous facts and opinions pertaining to their area, articulating these into a coherent narrative vision about a better place, telling a positive tale about the future. Planning as storytelling sees the power of rhetoric, but also sees the potential of this as a positive force, and one in which multiple stories have a place (Throgmorton, 2003). By drawing on cemetery managers' stories of the cemetery in the city, this paper aims to bring these presently unheard voices into the debate about the priorities for urban futures, weaving these spaces in to broader understandings of good, or better, places.…”

Where was the wall then? Where is it now?

“…But the contrasts also lead me to claim that Bartholomew's planning for Louisville in the 1950s was implicitly affected by Cold War-era efforts to repress any transformations that could be Moreover, the meaning of a wall is not an objective fact, independent of interpretation. Rather, its meaning depends on the narrative context (i. e., story) in which it is set (Throgmorton, 2003). One key story is the designer's.…”

Making a difference : boundary management in spatial governance

“…Looking in more detail into the process of communication and framing, some scholars have pointed at the way power is played out in local planning practices (see for example Flyvbjerg, 1998b;Richardson, 2006;Throgmorton, 2003). In Flyvbjerg's and Richardson's (2002, p. 47) words, "communication is more typically characterised by non-rational rhetoric and maintenance of ~ 58 ~ interests than by freedom from domination and consensus-seeking".…”