Lieven Ameel

School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies, University of Tampere, Kanslerinrinne 1,33014 Tampere, Finland.

Keywords: urban planning; waterfront development; Helsinki; urban form; narrative

The ‘‘Narrative’’ Turn in Urban Planning

The paradigm shift from a top-down kind of planning towards a more dialogic, participatory and discursive form of planning (cf. Fischer, 2009) also includes a move towards the acknowledgement and increasing use of diverse urban narratives.Sandercock (2010) situates the origins of what she calls the ‘‘story turn’’ in an epistemological crisis in planning theory – the need to account for the diverse kinds of ways of knowing that exist apart from technical knowledge. It is a paradigm shift that can be traced to Boyer’s Foucaultian analysis of American planning history and its discourses (1983), and which gained critical impetus with Fischer and Forester’s volume The Argumentative Turn (1993), which drew its inspiration from the linguistic turn and from Habermas’s theory of communicative action. In the wake of the argumentative turn, new analytical approaches towards planning narratives appeared, drawing on rhetorics (Throgmorton, 1993, 1996), and the analysis of story lines and discourse coalitions (Hajer, 1993), amongst others. Simultaneously, new conceptions of how planners work came into being, proposing communicative models of planning to take into account more diverse local narratives. Following a distinguishable communicative turn (Healey, 1993; Innes, 1995), new roles for planners have been proposed, such as that of the deliberative practitioner (Forester, 1999), and more recently, models for dealing with complex and differing narratives in public policy (Fischer, 2009; Forester, 2009; Innes and Booher, 2010). If planning practices have moved towards becoming more discursive and more dialogic, this entails a vision of the planner as a moderator of potentially competing narratives (see Mandelbaum, 1991).Leading urban theorists such as Patsy Healey have consequently called for planners to actively

take part in conscious ‘‘city story-writing’’ (2000, pp. 527–528).

While there has been a remarkable amount of writing within urban theory concerning narratives and planning, it could be argued that there prevails a proliferation of approaches to narratives in the

context of planning, and that there is, by consequence, a limited degree to which these various

studies communicate with each other. Recent research speaks of ‘‘imaginaries’’ (Bridge and Watson,

2000; Weiss-Sussex and Bianchini, 2006), urban ‘‘images’’ (Pagano and Bowman, 1995, pp. 44–67),

‘‘mythical chronotopes’’ (Keunen and Verraest, 2012), ‘‘narratives’’ (Tewdwr-Jones, 2011), ‘‘tales’’

(Dormans, 2008), ‘‘stories’’ (Sandercock, 2003, 2010) and ‘‘metaphors’’ (Baeten, 2001), amongst many others. Applying concepts from narrative studies and drawing up a taxonomy of narratives in the context of planning–a task this article setsout todo– will be helpful in distinguishing the different kinds of narratives at stake in planning, and the way in which stories may ‘‘travel’’ from the one context to the other. The analysis of planning narratives on the basis of such a typology and their transformation during planning processes could then provide a helpful instrument with the potential to further expose issues of politics, decision-making and narrative legitimacy in planning processes: whose stories are retained, and under what guise? How are these negotiated?

Narrative Studies and Planning – Story and Narrative

So far, narratology or literary studies have had limited impact on the study of narrative in urban

planning (see however, Keunen and Verraest, 2012). Urban planning and theory are not, however, the only fields in which the past few decades have seen an increasing interest in questions of narrative. Indeed, as Kreiswirth (2005) points out, in ‘‘the last decade narrative has become a significant focus of inquiry in virtually all disciplinary formations’’ (p. 378). Theorists within literary

studies and the social sciences have developed models with which to adapt narratological concepts

to non-literary narratives, such as biographies, media narratives, patient diaries, to name but a few examples (see e.g. Bruner, 1991; Heinen and Sommer, 2009). The result has been a conceptualization of narrative that can, with some modifications, also be adapted to urban planning.

What counts as ‘‘narrative’’ in the context of urban planning? Reflecting a widely accepted approach in narrative theory, Gerald Prince (2003) has defined narrative as the recounting of real or fictitious

events by one or several narrators to one or several narratees (the person or persons to whom the narration is addressed) (p. 58; see also Fludernik, 2009, p. 5). This broad definition can be appliedwith relative ease to urban planning documents: planners (or a planning agency) can be seen as the narrator(s), who recount a story, usually aimed at the inhabitants of the area affected by planning, who in their turn act as narratees. Most of the recounted events will be real enough, but planning documents tend to involve also conjectured elements, such as claims about what an area will look and feel like in the future. In addition to planners’ narratives of a particular area, there is a wide variety of narratives produced by others: by inhabitants (in writing or speech) or more generally by interested parties; narratives distributed by the press, or recounted by politicians.

Giving a definition of narrative will not suffice without also identifying the characteristics of story. Story and narrative form a crucial binary pair in narrative studies. Story can be understood as the mentally constructed event (or sequence of events) a narrator has in mind, and narrative as the actual

recounting of these events in question (see however, Ryan, 2005, pp. 347–348). What are the minimum requirements for a story? Is, for example, a list that outlines the national land use objectives (a standard component of Finnish urban planning documents) a story? Drawing on the

definition by Marie-Laure Ryan (2005), a story is defined here as 1. involving one or more humanlike

agents, 2. presenting a world that goes through some kind of (not entirely predictable) change of situation and 3. the event(s) in the story is/are associated with mental states (p. 347). A brief discussion of one specific example from planning documents will clarify how these features of story may appear in planning documents. The following text, part of the impact assessment in the local component master plan of Ja¨tka¨saari, tells the story of a changing Helsinki, andJa¨tka¨saari’s role in the overall development.

Various instances can be singled out as the‘‘human or human-like agents’’ in this story: depending on the perspective, the agents in the story are the area’s inhabitants, and/or planners of the area involved, or, in case we allow for humanlike protagonists, the personified area itself can be seen as acting as agent, or the city or the planning agency. A transformation of the area (presumably for the better) constitutes the ‘‘change of situation’’, and the ‘‘mental states’’ from our definition of

story could refer to the underlying, implicit political issues at stake in the decision-making.

In the course of this article, this particular story – of Ja¨tka¨saari as being situated in the Helsinki

centre, and of its development as benefiting the city’s viability – will reappear several times in various, and sometimes very diverging, narrative forms. While stories (such as the regeneration story) can be generic, narratives are specific: they are made individual by specific wordings, style, all the intricacies stemming from being narrated from a particular point of view, and from being directed towards a particular audience. The narrative quoted above does not only tell a regeneration story, it makes several rhetorical arguments, in specific wordings: it posits the earlier loss of inhabitants as undesirable, it equates urban vitality with the number of inhabitants, it marks Ja¨tka¨saari as an area identified with the central, chore area of the Finnish capital. Narratives, the actualized emanations of stories, concretize much of the rhetorical attributes that remain abstract in stories. Bearing in mind the distinction between story and narrative makes it possible to trace how stories are shaped into differing narratives, to fit different purposes aimed at different audiences. Such transformations in context or authorship can restructure the role and meaning of any given story, which is why it makes sense to look at the various levels at which narratives act in the context of planning. Three such types of narratives are proposed here.

（文章来源：URBAN DESIGN International excerpted）