Urban Narratives

Towards a Narrative Turn in Planning?

Posted on 10.2.2015 by Lieven Ameel

The latest edition of the Finnish Journal for Urban Studies, a theme issue on culture, design and planning, contains my first article on narrative planning, a short overview of the quite recent “narrative turn” in urban planning. The article was online for a moment, but has apparently been taken offline – the journal policy is to publish online after one year in paper. If you’re interested, contact me for a pdf.

reference:

Ameel, Lieven 2014: ”Kohti kerronnallista käännettä yhdyskuntasuunnittelussa.” (”Towards a Narrative Turn in Urban Planning.” Yhdyskuntasuunnittelu (”Finnish Journal for Urban Studies”) 2014 (2), 62-27.

Talk in Copenhagen 17 April 2015

Posted on 4.2.2015 by Lieven Ameel

Looking forward to give a talk at the University of Copenhagen, department of Nordic Research, 17 April 2015. The talk will be at the Institute of Name Research. Abstract below.

The talk is part of my research project on the narration of waterfront development in Helsinki.

See also the department’s website for more information: http://nfi.ku.dk/konferencer-og-seminarer/ameel17042015/

Abstract

In urban studies and urban planning, the last decades have witnessed something of a “narrative turn”: an increasing interest in the potential of narratives. In the case of Helsinki’s ongoing and large-scale urban projects, city narratives have been explicitly foregrounded by the City Planning Department.

The developments at Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama, two waterfront sites in central Helsinki, provide particularly complex case studies. The most conspicuous use of cultural narratives is the recent move of the Helsinki City to hire 8 artists to help the Planning Department to develop the city, the mediatized use of landscape art to help create spatial identities, and the commissioning of a literary novel in Jätkäsaari. It is possible to also identify several examples of less obvious, but at least as pervasive narratives, from official websites with historical information, to the fostering of narrative treads in social community websites, and the mini-narratives provided by street names and 3D-projections of how this neighborhood will look like in the future.

My presentation explores how methods from literary and narrative studies can bring new insights to the many – often very diverse – narratives that are used consciously and unconsciously in the development of new urban areas. How are such narratives structured? Are they used merely as vehicles to brand new neighborhoods, or as means to legitimize specific – perhaps controversial? – solutions? Or are they used to create more tangible experiences of belonging, and to strengthen a sense of personally experienced place? I will apply methodologies from narrative studies, such as genre, plot and metaphor, and conduct a close reading of the relevant planning documents. I will conclude with an examination of the toponyms of the streets, quarters and squares in Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari, and with an analysis of how these place names complement the planning narratives.

Some Thoughts on Conceptual Images and Planning

Posted on 13.1.2015 by Lieven Ameel

The Finnish daily HS recently published an article on the difference between conceptual images of urban planning, and the “real thing”. A similar exercise had been done earlier, in a similar, critical vein by YLE. In his recent blog post, prof. Kimmo Lapintie dissects the reasoning in these articles. One important insight from his post: concept images in town planning differ fundamentally from concept images used for the planning of specific buildings – the first category gives general information about such things as the height of buildings and their location, but not, for example, about facades or balconies and the like. While I agree with the blog that concept images are indeed not to be taken at their face value, and are not intended to be so, I disagree with the implication that most citizens do possess the necessary “reading skills” with which to approach conceptual images. In this sense, adding disclaimers (such as “this building is not going to be really constructed, but simply shows the approximate height, location and size”) could in fact act as a genuinely useful act of public education, rather than as a joke.

source: HS.fi 11.1.2015

New Critical Geographies Volume out – narrativity as tool

Posted on 8.1.2015 by Lieven Ameel

Not entirely related to issues of urban studies, but a new volume of ACME is out, with some interesting avenues of research into narrative and spatiality. The article “Using Narrativity as Methodological Tool” by Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola offers one part of the story how narrative analysis gained ground in geography and the social sciences. It’s a rather shortish article however – more concrete narrative analysis, and more extensive examples of specific methodological tools and their application could have further strenghtened the (very valid) case for narrative-oriented research into questions of (critical) geography. Promising approach nonetheless.

http://www.acme-journal.org/volume13-3.html

Urban Interventions and the impermanent city

Posted on 16.12.2014 by Lieven Ameel

Stumbled across this book via Stadt 2.0:

Transforming Cities. Urban Interventions in Public Space by Kristin Feireiss and Oliver G. Hamm.

One particularly interesting-looking article is “Pretty Vacant. Embracing Impermanence
in Architecture and Urban Planning” by Lukas Feireiss, which takes its clue from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the city of Sophronia. Haven’t been able yet to read it in full, but it promises an evocation of a kind of “temporary
architecture that contests the preoccupation of architecture
as being permanent”. Sample pages can be found here.

Reading Cities – from a European Perspective

Posted on 17.11.2014 by Lieven Ameel

Listening today to Karl Schlögel at GUST (Ghent). Re-reading European (mid-size, peripheral) cities and re-reading the European project in “Steden lezen” (Reading Cities), the Dutch translation of a selection of his publications on cities.

“… cities are like open books, history books as well as encyclopaedias of daily lives. Their squares, facades and blueprints can be deciphered as a text that is rewritten, over-written, scratched, copied and again rewritten time and again.” (free translation of the introduction to the Dutch translation; Schlögel 8)

For more, see here Ed Taverne’s perspective on Schlögel’s contribution to redefining the European city.

Schlögel is also the author of this fascinating book on Moscow 1937.

Tactical Urbanism: the new “Quick Fix” for Urban Policy?

Posted on 14.11.2014 by Lieven Ameel

Moving on from my previous post: in “Tactical Urbanism: The New Vernacular of the Creative City“, Oli Mould looks at how the “creative city” discourse has gradually become replaced by a new vernacular, that of “tactical urbanism”. De Certeau’s concepts of urban, everyday “tactics” is one of the relevant concepts in this context, and Mould has a rich set of data to work with, with a global outlook.

Is “tactical urbanism” merely the new “quick fix” for urban policy, as Mould suggests? There is certainly a risk that this is (or will be) the case. De Certeau (and Deleuze & Guattari) have in several instances (and, of course, often in fairly complex language) described just how thoroughly totalizing, profit- and control-driven ideologies can incorporate and appropriate small-scale, everyday counter-“tactics”. It is a disturbing phenomenon that could also be discerned in research on parkour conducted by Sirpa Tani and myself on parkour – as we wrote in the conclusion to our article “Parkour: Creating Loose Space?”: “the potential of unexpected and unintended activities such as parkour to foster a positive atmosphere for other loosening activities should be investigated further and … the perceived subversive character of traceurs … will need closer scrutiny and contextualization.” (Ameel & Tani 2012: 28)

What I missed most in Mould’s text was a the sense that small-scale urban tactics are worth the trouble – the sense that these welcome, and in indeed necessary, elements in the contemporary city, whatever their name and the narrative that is being attached to them (often unwillingly). As researchers, we can sit back and point out how (often white middle class) citizens in the urban trenches put up small-scale activities only to have them incorporated in the neoliberal newspeak they were supposed to upset. Worthwile activities are turned into totalizing tools by way of forceful narratives, and researchers have the potential to work actively towards providing people with a vocabulary that enables them to counter (neoliberal) “creative city” (and other) mantras.

GIS & Cultural Mapping for Preserving, Developing and Reconnecting the City

Posted on 7.11.2014 by Lieven Ameel

Getting acquainted with a rich collection of articles on the historical urban landscape, its preservation and development: Francesco Bandarin’s and Ron van Oers’s (eds.) Reconnecting the City. The Historic Urban Landscape Approach and the Future of Urban Heritage (2014).

(source: wiley.com)

The importance of a rigorous cultural mapping to understand the city’s many layers of meaning is one of the things rightly foregrounded in this volume.

And an interesting (and rare) warning about using GIS: GIS-based mapping “is useful for coordinating visual data and capturing the visual morphology of the city, but has its limitations when recording the urban experience” according to Julian Smith who has a few critical words for “modernist assumptions about mapping and documentation” in this volume (p. 224). Food for thought for the emerging GIS-enthusiasm in literary studies (see my earlier post here).

From the little I’ve seen of the volume so far, nevertheless, there are some points of view I would’ve like to see more of in a book like this. One is the potential of literary sources for a cultural or narrative mapping of place. A second one is the importance of resilient, everyday practices that give meaning to place, and that are so hard to pinpoint in urban heritage discourse. How to preserve and foster everyday spontaneity, in its many forms? And is preservation even desirable? One of the things that came up in the work I conducted with Sirpa Tani on parkour (see here), in particular in our article “Parkour: Creating Loose Spaces?”.

In view of this second comment, I’m increasingly looking forward to reading the upcoming book by Oliver Mould (a fellow parkour researcher), which promises a counter-narrative to the creative city discourse in the form of new interest in forms of urban subversion.

Geocritical Explorations, GIS-based literary analysis at MLA 2015

Posted on 3.11.2014 by Lieven Ameel

At the 130th Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association, Vancouver, a special session entitled “Geocritical Explorations inside the Text” will be organized, with several abstracts dealing with GIS-based literary analysis.

http://moacir.com/talks/mla-15-geocritical-explorations-inside-the-text/abstracts/

Following up on recent geogricitical explorations such as the collected volumes Geocritical Explorations and the volume Literary Cartographies, both edited by Robert Tally. with some articles on city literature.

Recent applications of geographical technologies in literature include Gregory & Cooper’s article on GIS and Victorian literature and culture (2013).

[update] All feeding into what could be called the larger field of geohumanities, the advent of which is briefly touched upon here by Tim Cresswell.

Reminds me I have to take this volume off the shelf and start re-reading: GeoHumanities. Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (Michael Dear et al. 2011).

Cities of Affluence and Anger

Posted on 7.10.2014 by Lieven Ameel

Re-reading Cities of Affluence and Anger. A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (2006), by Peter J. Kalliney. Not only very convincing readings of a number of still highly relevant novels, but also convincing links between literary expressions of the city, and prevalent discourse in urban planning and development.

Source: University of Virginia Press

The 4th chapter, on the Angry Young Men, for example, ‘’reads the Angry reliance on domesticity in the context of England’s postwar reconstruction and alongside contemporary accounts of home” and draws on “vernacular architecture of the period and the welfare state’s urban planning initiatives to sketch the parameters of class and masculinity in literary accounts of family life.” (Kalliney 116)

Kalliney presents here an eloquent illustration of what literary studies can bring to our understanding of city development (and vice verse).