Urban Narratives

Vantaa’s New Branding: Erasing Identity?

Posted on 12.2.2015 by Lieven Ameel

Don’t know whether one should laugh or cry about this: one of the most critical, and revealing, reviews of (sub)urban branding in Finland comes from “graphic designer of the year” Kasper Strömman’s blog, a satirical design blog.

Strömman examines the new branding effort of the city of Vantaa (due north from Helsinki). The blog (in Finnish) carries the title “how to erase a city’s identity by using graphic design” (my translation). I haven’t followed Vantaa’s branding campaign myself, and Strömman’s link to Vantaa’s “brand book” doesn’t work (anymore?), so I have no access to the relevant sources, but on the basis of the material, there may well be some truth in the blog post’s title. Strömman’s key critique is that Vantaa invested in branding because the city felt it lacked a strong identity, but that it turned to generic images instead of making use of genuinely local identity markers in the pictures it used. The campaign images apparently come from international image banks – and what, really, is left of the identity of a city when the very image that wants to display the specific feel of Vantaa can as easily be used to sell an Australian children’s contact centre or an American insurance company, as Strömman points out?

[source: nyt.fi / kasperstromman.fi / http://www.tccc.org.au/]

By way of contrast, I just today reread Panu Lehtovuori’s article on Helsinki’s shorelines, in which Lehtovuori argues for urban planning that embraces differences, place-based solutions, and the uniqueness of a particular place, and emphasizes the stratifications of local meaning as potential cultural resources for the future. Couldn’t agree more.

Lehtovuori, Panu 2012: ”Rannat Helsingin seudun dynamoina.” In Lahti, Juhana; Paatero, Kristiina & Rauske, Eija (eds.): Rantaviivoja. Asuinalueita veden äärellä. Helsinki: Suomen arkkitehtuurimuseo, 20-31.

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.

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.

Narrative approaches to the city

Posted on 24.9.2014 by Lieven Ameel

Reading through an interesting contribution to the theory of narrativity and the study of city & city planning: Bond & Thompson-Fawcett’s article “Multiplicities, interwoven threads, holistic paths: The phronetic long-haul approach” in the volume Qualitative Urban Analysis – several other articles in the volume offer insights in the use of narrative approaches for multidisciplinary research.

“The tiny details, often reduced and overlooked in analysis, can reveal the depth of the meaning people have for places and spaces with which they identify. Narratives provide a means to make sense of and understand social phenomena and individual experience (Flyvberg, 2004a). Narratives carry a degree of explanation because they are recalled from memories of events and reconstructed in the telling (Czarniawska, 2004; Eckstein, 2003; Sandercok, 2003). The retelling of stories involves a process of framing, whereby events are characterised, segmented, categorised and ordered through a reconstruction (Bruner, 1990). A narrative approach is co-terminous with a requirement for thick qualitative data, through which the researched speak in their voices to tell their stories.

Via a polyphony of voices, narratives provide a lens through which realities, processes and events can be gleaned.” (Bond & Thompson-Fawcett, 2008, pp. 56-57)

As planning is increasingly conducted by using narrative strategies, the development of a narrative theory becomes crucial for an examination of how our cities function, and Bond & Thompson-Fawcett make an important contribution in this direction. What could be taken further: the development of concrete tools for an analysis. Narrative & literary studies offer promising avenues of research for such an integrated narrative analysis of planning. Something I hope to develop further in my research on narrating urban redevelopment. More about that here.

Source:

Bond, Sophie, & Thompson-Fawcett, Michelle. (2008). Multiplicities, interwoven threads, holistic paths: The phronetic long-haul approach. In P. J. Maginn, S. M. Thompson & M. Tonts (Eds.), Qualitative Urban Analysis: An International Perspective (pp. 51-78). Oxford: JAI Press.