Planning Stories Shape the Future

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Planning Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/14730952030022003
2003 2: 125Planning Theory
James A. Throgmorton
Planning as Persuasive Storytelling in a Global-Scale Web of Relationships
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P L A N N I N G A S P E R S U A S I V E
S T O R Y T E L L I N G I N A G L O B A L - S C A L E
W E B O F R E L A T I O N S H I P S
James A. Throgmorton
The University of Iowa, USA
125
Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 2(2): 125–151
[1473-0952(200307)2:2;125–151;035448]
www.sagepublications.com
Article
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.
Keywords persuasiveness, planning, power, spatialization, story-
telling, sustainability
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You are troubled by the course your life has taken. Seeking to turn it in a better
direction, you join seven other people in an innovative personal and group
therapy session. Meeting in an isolated but beautiful place, and guided by a
trained facilitator, you participate in several exercises over a four-day period.
One of the exercises involves telling your life story to the other people. The
facilitator divides the group into four pairs. You sit facing your first partner, and
the two of you condense your stories into tight three-minute tales. Having done
so, you move to a new partner and share stories with her. You then turn to a
third partner and share stories with him. Having told your story three times,
you observe that, although the basic story has not changed, the detailed telling
of it has; you recalled other key events and changed the emphasis on particular
moments. But then the facilitator instructs you to narrate your story in such a
way as to intentionally evoke a strong and important feeling (joy, grief, anger)
in the listener without telling the listener what that feeling is supposed to be.
You choose to convey sadness to your new partner. As you do so, you realize
that your story is changing significantly. Then the facilitator says, tell your story
in a way that evokes the opposite feeling. Now driven by joy, your story changes
dramatically. Then the facilitator instructs you to omit a key event or person
from your story. It changes once again. Finally, you tell your story as if your big
dream – that which you’ve always wanted to do – has already become part of
your life. After telling this version, you feel exhilarated and charged with
energy. At the end of the day, you realize that you have just experienced
something quite moving. A transformative experience.
This vignette suggests that no one true story about the past (even our very
personal one) can be told; rather, there are only constructions of it. Further-
more, the content of a story depends on one’s purpose in telling it. And
lastly, our choice about which story to tell has profound implications for
how we feel about ourselves and others and about the stories we choose to
live in the future.
But what does this have to do with planning and cities? In brief, it
suggests that stories and storytelling might be an extremely important but
largely undervalued part of planning. At a minimum, it suggests that good
planning might include collecting and telling stories about both the past and
the future. It also raises the possibility that good planning might, in itself,
be a matter of persuasive storytelling about the future. But the tale also
implies that more than one story can be told about the future of cities and
regions, and hence that we must ask how one can compare differing stories
and choose among them. But it also raises the possibility that good planning
should enable diverse stories to inform and potentially transform one
another.
I first made this set of claims in my 1996 book, Planning as Persuasive
Storytelling.1 In brief, I argued that planning can usefully be construed as
persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the future. Three broad lines
of critique have been directed against that claim. One argues that to think
of planning as storytelling is to open the floodgates to fabrications; truth,
Planning Theory 2(2)126

not stories, is what matters. The second essentially argues that power has a
rationality that rationality does not know; power, not stories, is what
matters (Flyvbjerg, 1998). And the third suggests that there is more to story-
telling than first meets the eye. Furthermore, my claim was not well
connected to contemporary scholarship about economic restructuring and
the emergence of a globalized ‘network society’and the postmodern, global,
or transnational city (Castells, 1996; Dear, 2000; Friedmann, 1995; Harvey,
2000; Sassen, 1991; Smith, 2001; Soja, 2000).
This article will revise my earlier argument in light of these three broad
lines of critique and the work of these urban theorists. It will argue that
planners’ stories about the future will necessarily have to begin from a
normative position, but, to be persuasive to a wide range of readers, they
will also have to make narrative and physical space for diverse locally
grounded common urban narratives (Finnegan, 1998), juxtapose those
narratives against one another, and enable the actual geohistorical readers
of transnational places to engage in fruitful dialogue with their fellow
strangers (Eckstein, 2003). Powerful actors will strive to eliminate or
marginalize competing stories, and hence will induce some planners to
devise plans (stories about the future) that are designed to persuade only
the audiences that most matter to them.
The claim restated
Let me begin by briefly restating my original claim in somewhat greater
detail. If we understand planning to be an exercise in persuasive storytelling,
or at least to incorporate and be influenced by stories and storytelling, then
it might be helpful to begin by thinking of planners (and others involved in
planning) as authors who write texts (plans, analyses, articles) that can be
read (constructed and interpreted) in diverse and often conflicting ways.
Such planner–authors have to write texts that emplot (or arrange and shape,
or at a minimum seek to turn) the flow of future action. To do it well, these
planner–authors have to fill that flow of action with interesting and believ-
able characters (for example, planners, developers, neighbors, elected
officials) who act in settings (for example, in older inner-city neighborhoods,
in suburbanizing landscapes, in public hearings). These planner–authors
have to build conflict, crisis, and resolution into their narratives, such that
key antagonists are somehow changed or moved significantly. They have to
adopt distinct points of view and draw upon the imagery and rhythm of
language (including statistical models, forecasts, GIS-based maps, three-
dimensional architectural renderings and virtual reality models, surveys,
advisory committees, and other persuasive figures of speech and argument,
or tropes) to express a preferred attitude toward the situation and its char-
acters. Through emplotment, characterizations, descriptions of settings, and
rhythm and imagery of language, such ‘planning stories’ unavoidably shape
the readers’ attention, turning it this way instead of that.
Throgmorton Planning as persuasive storytelling 127

The raw material of planning stories emerges from the practical world of
day-to-day life, but stories cannot tell themselves. Rather, they must be
transformed into narratives and then be told.2 That act of construction is
necessarily selective and purposeful. One chooses to include this but
exclude that, to start (and end) a story this way rather than that, to use these
words rather than those, to conﬁgure the events of the story this way rather
than that. As the opening vignette suggests, these purposes in turn are
tightly connected to emotion. We choose to tell certain stories because they
matter to us, and we tell them in certain ways because those ways of telling
feel right (often for reasons we are not fully conscious of). Thus planning
stories are often about (or are inspired by) powerful memories, deep fears,
passionate hopes, intense angers, and visionary dreams, and it is these
emotions that give good stories their power. In the end, such stories shape
meaning and tell readers (and listeners) what is important and what is not,
what counts and what does not, what matters and what does not. Such
future-oriented stories guide readers’ sense of what is possible and desir-
able. If told well, they enable readers to envision desirable transformations
in their cities, long for the transformations, feel inspired to act, and believe
that their actions will actually have an effect.
To suggest that planning can be thought of as a form of storytelling runs
against the grain of conventional planning practice, which is deeply imbued
with the ethics, ambitions, and sometimes the obfuscations of science. Still
focused on trying to control the future of territorially bounded representa-
tive democracies though the application of technical expertise, most prac-
ticing planners want to believe that they can be neutral, objective, rational
adjudicators of the public interest, and that their texts have a single literal
meaning (the one planners intend) that any intelligent person can grasp.3
For example, planning scholars E.J. Kaiser and D.R. Godschalk (2000) say,
‘Development planning can be thought of as a serious community game in
which the values and interests of many players are at stake. All players seek
to achieve the future land use pattern that best suits their needs. Govern-
ment planners work to facilitate an efﬁcient and equitable development
process that balances stakeholder interests and results in a desirable land
use pattern’ (p. 152). Recognizing that all players, including planners, are
interdependent, these planners ‘facilitate cooperation to achieve win–win
outcomes’ (p. 153). Kaiser and Godschalk’s formulation notwithstanding,
all planners also know that context (political pressures, funding constraints,
and the like) shapes their work and that other people often respond to the
planners’ texts in antagonistic ways. So planners are caught in a bind
between what they want to believe and what they know is true, between
espoused theory and actual practice. This often leads to much confusion,
most importantly to the idea that planning is purely a technical activity and
politics is something that takes place downstream from the technical work
and can only muck it up.4 Contrary to this literal view, a persuasive story-
telling perspective implies that the meaning(s) of the planners’ texts

depend(s) on their contexts; that is, their meaning(s) depend(s) on the story
or stories of which they are a part.5
Not all planners’ texts explicitly or intentionally engage in persuasive
storytelling. In many cases, their texts act as part of some larger story. Often
this larger story is presented only in cursory fashion; readers have to infer
it or unearth it from other sources. In this context, the planners’ texts act as
tropes that seek to turn the larger implicit story in a preferred direction.
DeLeon (1992) offers a good example in his analysis of how professional
planners advanced the ‘progrowth regime’s’ story in San Francisco from the
early 1960s to the mid-1980s. He claims that the regime ‘brought order out
of hyperpluralistic chaos’ and that the progrowth regime ‘became the
author of the city’s vision, architect of its plans, and source of its power to
get things done’ (p. 40). Those who conceptualized the progrowth regime
envisaged downtown San Francisco as a commercial, financial, and admin-
istrative headquarters that would link the USA to an emerging transpacific
urban community. To achieve that vision, blighted areas near the downtown
would have to be cleared, undesirable populations would have to be
removed, the regional transportation system would have to be improved,
and high-rise office buildings would have to be put in place. Moreover,
achieving that vision required construction of a political coalition that
would supply the strategic leadership, mobilize the resources, and coordi-
nate actors in such a way as to guide and empower the city’s transformation.
So the progrowth coalition created a series of organizations designed to
articulate strategic visions, offer detailed plans and proposals, and carry out
specific projects. According to DeLeon, this progrowth regime ‘paved a
smooth road that led to a new San Francisco . . . a West Coast Manhattan,
a gleaming global gateway to the Pacific Rim’ (p. 43).
If we treat planning as a process of constructing persuasive stories about
the future of cities, where meaning depends on context, then much can be
learned from the practice of literary criticism. Reader-response theory tells
us that the meaning of the planners’ texts lies not just in the authors’ intent
or the written documents themselves but also, as suggested above, in what
the various readers bring to the texts. This notion has important impli-
cations for planning: planners cannot assume that any audience will receive
the same message that elected officials or planners intend to convey. Neither
can planners assume that their texts will evoke a single desired response if
‘read correctly’. The meaning of the text is contestable and negotiated
between the author and its many readers.
As if reader-response theory did not complicate matters enough, there is
another complication to consider: in our contemporary world, multiple
stories are being told simultaneously. Said differently, readers of one story
frequently are also the authors of their own stories, and their stories often
differ from the planners’. These diverse stories generate differing sets of
argumentative claims and evaluative criteria, with judgements of quality (is
this a good plan?) being dependent on who makes the judgements.

Moreover, both planners and readers are characters in each other’s stories,
often in ways that they can scarcely recognize. Lastly, since the meaning of
a statement, trend or action depends on its context, the simultaneous exist-
ence of multiple stories means that any one trend, action, or place – even
specific words, concepts, and statues – can have multiple and contestable
meanings. (What did the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center
mean?) This means that planners act in a contextual web of relationships
and partial, contestable truths.
Furthermore, future-oriented storytelling is not simply persuasive. It is
also constitutive. The way in which planners – and others involved in the
process of planning – write and talk shapes community, character, and
culture. How planners (as authors) choose to characterize (name and
describe) the people who inhabit and activate their stories shapes how those
characters are expected to act and relate to one another. And how planners
write and talk shapes who ‘we’ (as a temporary community of authors and
readers) are and can become.
Lastly, cities and their planning-related organizations can be thought of as
nodes in a global-scale web, a web that consists of a highly fluid and constantly
(albeit subtly) changing set of relationships. These relationships can in turn
be defined as links between nodes, as paths through which goods, services,
energy, capital, information, and other social exchanges flow. This global-
scale web can be likened to a text that can be constructed and read in multiple
ways. Plans, in turn, can be understood as persuasive stories about how
particular nodes or links in the web should or will change in the future. When
one plans, one plans as part of a web of relationships. However, the point of
view from which one plans varies with one’s location in the web. To plan
effectively, planners (and others) have to recognize that they are embedded
in an intricate web of relationships, that they have to construct understand-
ings of that web, and that they then have to persuade others to accept their
constructions. But they also have to accept the fact that people tell diverse
and often conflicting stories. That means planners must also find ways to set
these alternate stories side by side, let them interact with one another, and
thereby let them influence judgements about how particular nodes and links
in the web should change, are likely to change, and why. In the end, the chal-
lenge for planners is ‘to begin planning based on the imagery of webs, nodes,
and links; to find ways to construct stories that reconfigure the web in per-
suasive and compelling ways; and to construct new forums which enable
public and democratic argumentation’ (Throgmorton, 1996: 257).
Critical responses to the claim
Four broad lines of critique have been directed against this basic claim. One
argues that to think of planning as storytelling is to open the floodgates to
fabrications; truth, not stories, is what matters. The second essentially

argues that power has a rationality that rationality does not know; power,
not stories, is what matters. The third is implicit. By not directly engaging
the work of urban theorists such as Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Saskia
Sassen, Michael Dear, John Friedmann, Edward Soja, and others, my claim
appears irrelevant to major contemporary arguments about the importance
and power of economic globalization. And the fourth critically analyzes the
concepts of author, story, and audience in relationship to the idea of
planning as persuasive storytelling. Let me address each of these broad lines
of critique.
To tell a story is to lie
Perhaps the most fundamental objection claims that telling a story means
making something up, writing fiction, telling lies. Why would planners want
to associate themselves with such fabrications? The most direct response is
to repeat that we (planners and others) tell stories all the time. It is unavoid-
able, for events cannot tell themselves. Events have to be configured in
relationship to one another and then narrated in order to be told. But ques-
tioning the possible falsehood of stories raises a more important question:
How can one tell whether one story is truer than another? And what should
one do in the face of lies or errors of fact? I think the questions miss the
point. It is completely appropriate to insist that planners and others tell the
truth about the facts of a matter, while simultaneously being aware that they
do not always do so. But I would suggest that, in most planning-related
cases, the facts matter far less than their interpretation. It is how facts are
configured relative to one another, how they are interpreted, or, in a word,
what they mean that matters. (Did President Clinton have a particular
sexual encounter with a young woman staff member? Evidently he did. The
more important question is what did that encounter mean?) So more fruitful
questions would be: How can one determine which story is more per-
suasive? More persuasive to whom? And why? To ask about meaning and
persuasiveness rather than truth is to shift attention from technical accuracy
to a combination of accuracy and normative evaluation. It is not to deny the
persuasive power of Web-based technologies and 3-D simulations that Brail
and Klosterman (2001) describe so well, but it is to place planning in a tech-
nical–political realm rather than an idealized world of pure technique. So
let me now turn to the political critique.
It is power, not storytelling, that matters
A related objection has been that, like other ‘communicative theories’ of
planning, persuasive storytelling privileges process over substantive issues
that are grounded in actual contexts (Lauria and Whelan, 1995; Yiftachel,
1999), and gives too much attention to action by planners and too little to
structural features that shape and limit those actions (Campbell and

Fainstein, 1996). And in his recent case study of planning in Aalborg,
Denmark, Bent Flyvbjerg (1998) has argued that power is always present
and cannot be done away with by a communicatively rational process.
Power creates the knowledge that is then used to determine reality; or, as
he puts it in a felicitous turn of phrase, ‘power has a rationality that ration-
ality does not know’ (p. 234).
Although some of the ‘communicative’ literature does indeed pay too
little attention to political context, this criticism misses the mark for my
book. As Patsy Healey (1997) and Vanessa Watson (2002) both note, I
clearly presented a nested set of stories about electric power planning in the
Chicago area, with each story being placed in a progressively larger context.
Moreover, stories cannot tell themselves; they must be transformed into
narratives and then be told. That act of construction is necessarily selective
and purposeful: that is, necessarily political. As Michael P. Smith (2001: 43)
argues, this means it is important to focus attention on ‘representational
power’ and to ask, ‘Who has the power to give meaning to things, to name
others, to construct the character of collective identities, to shape the
discussion of urban politics [and to ask]. . .what are the appropriate bound-
aries of urban politics?’ In this context, I see more similarity than difference
between my work and Flyvbjerg’s. He narrates a fascinating story about
planning and development, he immerses readers in the flow of action by
writing in the present tense, he fills the story with interesting and believable
characters, he places the action in the real-life settings of Aalborg, he
persuades his readers by relying heavily on the trope of irony, and he draws
on interviews and his own observations to characterize the key actors.
Flyvbjerg has told a persuasive story that (necessarily) has a political
purpose: to convince its readers that planning is political and that planners
must learn to be more effective in the political arena.
What counts is good theorizing about the network society or the
global city, not (mere) storytelling
These comments about context point to a third line of critique. In a 1997
review of my book, planning scholar Jeanne Wolfe suggested that the
Chicago electric power case could have been more fruitfully analyzed from
a neo-Marxist, post-Fordist, or postmodernist perspective. In effect, she was
saying that I could have interpreted the Chicago case in the context of a
better, more fruitful, theoretical perspective. Her criticism can be restated:
Why would a scholar want to focus on (mere) storytelling? Do not real
scholars develop and test theories, especially ones that are deeply rooted in
the neo-Marxian critique of capitalist-led globalization and urbanization?
In general, Wolfe’s comments reflect the perspective of the urban
theorists mentioned previously. While these theorists differ from one
another in many important ways, they collectively argue that several
important trends or processes (for example, economic globalization, global

communication systems, transnational migrations, complex environmental
flows and cycles, and exurbanization of development in the regions of ‘the
North’) have been producing the ‘global,’ ‘postmodern,’ or ‘transnational’
city, and that these trends/processes have been transgressing, undermining,
and reshaping the conventional technical, political, and epistemological
boundaries that have shaped planners’ work.
I think these urban theorists are right in drawing attention to these factors;
they create the context that shapes local stories. But why should one embrace
a neo-Marxian construction/interpretation of this context rather than, say,
one that celebrates a right-wing populist nationalism or the now-dominant
free market neo-liberalism? The answer cannot be derived solely by
comparing the theories’ explanatory or predictive power, or by testing the
accuracy of their factual claims. The global-scale web is awash with theories,
each of which purposefully constructs understandings of the web, restricts
attention to a few phenomena, and typically ignores other theories.6 Given
that, I would, like Ruth Finnegan (1998: 14–23), argue that urban theories
can usefully be characterized as stories: they postulate some temporal
ordering of events and emplot those events as historical change, they typi-
cally use basic narrative plots to provide coherent explanation, they position
scholars as the tellers of abstract and generalizable tales, and they draw upon
expected patterns of form, context, and delivery. Michael P. Smith (2001)
likewise argues, quite persuasively in my view, that ‘contemporary theories
of political economy and globalization are themselves situated systems of
representation, contested readings that give alternative meaning to the “out
there” of political economy and global restructuring’ (p. 31). To interpret
these theoretical constructs as persuasive stories is not to deride their value.
Neither is it to suggest that one should not pay attention to them. It is merely
to suggest that they can be made more or less persuasive to pertinent audi-
ences by attending to the basic principles of good storytelling.
Jeanne Wolfe also said that the case I chose to analyze was not an appro-
priate one for ‘city and regional planning as we understand it’ (Wolfe, 1997:
527, emphasis added). Perhaps. But note that she constructs the community
of planners in a particular way. Others might – in fact do – construct it differ-
ently. So I would reply that electric power planning is still planning, and that
to find such a scientific and technical form of planning being practiced as a
form of persuasive storytelling is not trivial. More important, I would argue
that the case I studied took place in one of the nodes (Chicago) and
pertained to one of the links (electric power) of a global-scale web of
relationships.
Geography-planning scholar Edward Soja (2003) has recently offered a
critique of the storytelling claim, which I find to be quite constructive. In his
view, the narrative mode typically ignores space. Accordingly he warns, ‘the
practice of persuasive storytelling must be approached with caution, not
because storytelling and the narrative form more generally are not attract-
ive and powerful ways of understanding the world, but because they may

be too powerful and compelling, silencing alternative modes of critical
thinking and interpretation, especially with regard to the spatiality of time’
(p. 207). Quoting art theorist John Berger, he emphasizes, ‘It is scarcely any
longer possible to tell a straight story sequentially unfolding in time. And
this is because we are too aware of what is continually traversing the story
line laterally’ (p. 208). On this point, I would agree with Soja. Economic
globalization, transnational migrations, and global environmental systems
have radically transformed the context of local action. Local planning takes
place in the context of a global-scale web of relationships. To be viable and
legitimate in present circumstances, persuasive storytelling must take into
account the diverse ways in which stories spatialize that web. We must
spatialize the storytelling imagination.
There is more to storytelling than first meets the eye
The last critique I would like to address comes from a scholar of English
and American Studies, Barbara Eckstein (2003). Focusing her attention on
authors, stories, and audiences, she basically makes three claims: first, it is
not clear why readers should trust any planner’s claim to have converted
‘community stories’ into a single persuasive story; second, the best stories –
ones that produce a will to change – are ones that disrupt habits of thought
and ‘defamiliarize’ the familiar; and third, the best stories ‘conscript’
readers who are willing to engage strangers (‘geohistorical readers’) in
dialogue. She substantiates these claims by focusing on three important
concepts: authors, stories, and audience.
With regard to authorship, Eckstein rightly observes that it is usually
quite difficult to determine who the authors of plans really are. ‘Community
storytellers’ construct and tell contending community stories, but these
people typically disappear in plans and in planning theories about story-
telling; the planner supplants them as the storyteller, usually in ways that
cannot be discerned. As a reader, she wants to know what authorizes the
way planners transform those community stories into authoritative plans.
In order for readers to assess and trust the planners’ claims to authority, she
advises planners to think of themselves as ones who ‘make space’ for stories
to be heard. As she puts it, ‘It is their knowledge of traditional stories and
local conventions; it is their skill as narrators, as “hosts”, for stories they
hear and retell; it is their demeanor, their voice, their ordering, their
shaping, their ability – literally – to create an amiable narrative and physical
space, that allow their telling, retelling, and thus transformation of the
community’s stories to be heard’ (Eckstein, 2003: 21).
With regard to stories, Eckstein observes that most people think of
stories as a means of bringing order to the chaos of events. Reversing that
expectation, she suggests that stories can ‘quite usefully disrupt the habits
of thought and action that control everyday life’ (Eckstein, 2003: 25). ‘The
will to change’, she claims,

has to come from an ability – a planner’s ability, an urban user’s ability – to
imagine one’s self in a different skin, a different story, and a different place and
then desire this new self and place that one sees. It has to come from a
storyteller’s ability to make a narrative and physical space in which to juxtapose
multiple, traditional stories so that they enrich, renarrate, and transform that
space rather than compete for ultimate control of a single, linear, temporal
history of a impermeably bounded geopolitical place. (Eckstein, 2003: 24)
In this context, she draws attention to the use and importance of duration
(the amount of story time) and frequency (the number of times a theme is
advanced) in storytelling. Skill with duration provides the storyteller an
opportunity to rivet the readers’ attention on events and occasions that best
serve the storyteller’s intentions, whereas skill with frequency focuses
readers’ attention on patterns of significance. And drawing upon Soja’s
work, Eckstein observes that both the spaces made for storytelling and the
spaces stories make figure in the production and apprehension of meaning.
Since stories deploy different geographic scales and since their interpre-
tation depends upon careful reading of those scales, stories that ‘defamil-
iarize’ can compel audiences to shift their usual interpretive scale or spatial
perspective.
With regard to audience, Eckstein considers the importance of thinking
about the ‘conscripted reader.’ This notion refers to the way in which a text
drafts readers, however voluntarily, to play particular roles and to embrace
particular beliefs and values. But actual readers, she calls them ‘geohis-
torical readers’, negotiate with the conscription in accordance with their
interpretive communities (groups determined by cultural/professional
training or practice); the formative experiences of their geohistorically
situated, individual lives; and their dispositions. Sometimes geohistorical
readers blatantly resist being conscripted the way planner–authors desire.7
In the end, Eckstein concludes:
The storyteller is the one who actively makes space for the story(s) to be heard.
An effective story is that narrative which stands the habits of everyday life on
their heads so that blood fills those brainy cavities with light. Such a story fully
exploits the materials of time (duration, frequency of repetition), time-space
(chronotope), and space (scale, perspective, remoteness) deliberately arranging
them in unfamiliar ways so that they conscript readers who are willing to
suspend their habits of being and come out in the open to engage in dialogue
with strangers. (Eckstein, 2003: 35–6)
The claim revised
These four broad lines of critique provide fruitful material upon which to
revise my initial claim. Knowing that the content of a story depends on its

purpose, I would begin by claiming that planners must be clear about their
purpose. I believe that contemporary planning stories must be inspired by
a normative vision. (As David Harvey [2000] puts it, ‘without a vision of
Utopia, there is no way to define that port to which we might want to sail’
[p. 189].) But which purpose, which vision? The answer is, of course,
contestable and therefore political. In the remainder of this article, I want
to suggest how planners could help imagine and create sustainable places
by making space for diverse locally grounded common urban narratives (or
community stories).
Planning stories should be inspired by the vision of sustainable
places
In the view of many people around the world, planning stories should be
inspired by the normative vision of the sustainable place; that is, by the
vision of creating city-regions that are ecologically healthy, economically
vital, socially just, and guided by richly democratic practices (see Beaure-
gard, 2003a; Throgmorton, 2003). According to this vision, planners should
be advocates for the sustainable city; they have to tell persuasive stories
about how sustainable places can and should be created.8 But it is also
important to recognize that, in the words of planning scholar Scott
Campbell (1996), ‘our sustainable future does not yet exist, either in reality
or even in strategy. We do not yet know what it will look like; it is being
socially constructed through a sustained period of conflict negotiation and
resolution. This is a process of innovation, not of discovery and converting
the nonbelievers’ (p. 302).
Places should be understood as multidimensional
One cannot make a ‘place’ more sustainable without having some sense of
what ‘place’ means, and it turns out that, as literary critic Lawrence Buell
(2001) puts it, ‘[a] place may seem quite simple until you start noticing
things’ (p. 62). Consider Louisville (Kentucky), Berlin (Germany), or any
urban place you know well. What does it mean to be connected to that
place? Surely it means, in part, thinking of it as home. It means feeling an
emotional attachment to the house in which you live, to the familiar
surroundings of your neighborhood, and – with decreasing intimacy – to
your city, your region, and perhaps even larger areas. But as Buell observes,
there are at least four other ways of being connected to a place (see Figure
1). Each of them provides, along with the first, ‘subject positions’ (Laclau
and Mouffe, 1985) from which stories about a place can be authored and
narrated.
One type of connection might be thought of as a scattergram or archi-
pelago of locales, some quite remote from one another. ‘Tenticular radia-
tions’ connect your home to those other locales. Think, for example, of the

FIGURE1
Fivedimensionsofplace-connectedness(afterBuell,2001)

electric power transmission lines that lead away from your home, of the
carbon dioxide that billows from your car’s tail pipe, of products you use
that are fabricated in distant places, or of goods produced in your area and
transported to other parts of the world.
Places also have histories and are constantly changing. These changes
superimpose upon the visible surface an unseen layer of usage, memory, and
significance. As historian Brian Ladd (1997) writes about Berlin, ‘Memories
often cleave to the physical settings of events. That is why buildings and
places have so many stories to tell. They give form to a city’s history and
identity’ (p. 1). In almost every place, some people display an acute aware-
ness of this invisible layer. But whose unseen layer should be remembered,
and how should that memory be embodied in the built environment?
A fourth type of connection derives from the fact that people are
constantly moving into or departing from places. Thus any one place
contains its residents’ accumulated or composite memories of all places that
have been significant to them over time. When Muslim Turks move to
Kreuzberg or Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, or when migrants from Central
America move to Louisville, they bring with them memories of those other
places and the pathways leading away from them.
Lastly, fictive or virtual places can also matter. Past imagined places such
as Ludwig Hilberseimer’s 1924 Hochhausstadt (Skyscraper City), Albert
Speer’s Germania, Harland Bartholomew’s 1929 plan for Louisville, the
cacatopian cityscape of the film Bladerunner, Kim Stanley Robinson’s
trilogy about the colonization of Mars, and many others have influenced
thought and action, for good and for bad. Advocates of contemporary free
market neo-liberalism have been arguing that we have come to ‘the end of
history’, that there is no alternative to their vision of capitalist democracy,
and that there is no need to imagine better places. Both Buell and David
Harvey (2000) observe, however, that the contemporary scholarly and
literary worlds are full of explorations of ‘the imaginary’ and of utopian
possibilities. We need alternative visions now, Harvey says, and those
visions should emerge out of ‘critical and practical engagement with the
institutions, personal behaviors, and practices that now exist’ (p. 186).
These five dimensions combine to form complex places. To a point, their
complexity can be can be witnessed by observing ‘everyday life’ from
Michel De Certeau’s (1984) street level perspective.9 Consider Berlin,
Germany. The capital of a reunited Germany, the center of an increasingly
integrated Europe, and a major site of global capital investment, this city of
4.2m people has been described as ‘a palimpsest of past desires’ (Balfour,
1990: 249) and a city of ‘unintended ugly beauty’ (Richie, 1998: xvi).
Walking amid the ghosts in Hackesche Markt, in the Tiergarten, along
Oranienburger Strasse, in Potsdamer Platz, and along Karl-Marx-Allee one
continually encounters juxtapositions of the old and the new, the renovat-
ing and the deteriorating, the ugly and the beautiful, the joyous and the
horrific. One can see Ossis and Wessis (former east and west Berliners),

Muslim Turks, foreign tourists, migrants from the former Soviet Union,
global investors, and a range of familiar and unfamiliar strangers mixing
with one another, with varying degrees of comfort and security.
Places should also be understood as nodes in a global-scale web of
relationships
If we think of each place as being a node in the global-scale web, with each
place being linked to all other places through a highly-fluid and continually-
changing set of relationships, then we can connect Buell’s conception of
place to the urban theorists’ research concerning the space of flows, the
global city, the postmodern city, and the transnational city (see Figure 2).
As Michael P. Smith argues,
there is no solid object known as the ‘global city’ appropriate for grounding
urban research, only an endless interplay of differently articulated networks,
practices, and power relations best deciphered by studying the agency of local,
regional, national, and transnational actors that discursively and historically
construct understandings of ‘locality,’ ‘transnationality,’ and ‘globalization’ in
different urban settings. (Smith, 2001: 49)
This means that multiple and contestable stories can be told from the
subject positions provided by these nodes and links.10 These stories often
follow the general contours of what Ruth Finnegan (1998) calls ‘common
urban narratives’.
Common urban narratives emerge from subject positions provided
by the web’s nodes and links
Finnegan claims that common urban narratives (often expressed abstractly
as urban theories) are told about cities in general, but that such narratives
become locally anchored in specific urban places. Exemplifying these
common urban narratives would be the oft-told story about how industri-
alization, urbanization, and the artificial culture of the city destroy rural and
communal nature. In one variant, this story emphasizes the movement from
misery to happiness, while acknowledging that losses occur along the way.
In another, it focuses on the losses. In still another, it focuses on locally
based social movements’ heroic efforts to resist destruction. When told by
urban theorists and other scholars, these common urban narratives often
seem to express a point of view (or subject position) that stands outside or
above the web, construct understandings of the web that privilege class over
all other relationships and identities, and tend to treat ‘the global’ as the site
of history’s dynamic flows and driving forces and ‘the local’ as the site at
which cultural meanings are produced and social movements of reaction or

F I G U R E 2
Place-connectedness in a global-scale web of relationships

resistance are formed (Smith, 2001). They are, of course, irretrievably
immersed in the web.
Once locally grounded in specific places, these common urban narratives
contain their own unique details and community stories. Focusing on the
new town of Milton Keynes in England, Finnegan finds four locally
anchored stories. According to one of them – the planners’ tale – planners
develop and successfully carry out their ‘master plan’. Although not without
its twists and turns, the planners’ story has a clear beginning and end, a clear
plot (destiny fulfilled), and an evident hero (the Development Corpora-
tion), and it is disseminated through many media.
This tale is consistent with planning scholar Leonie Sandercock’s (1998)
claim that modernist planning historians tell a heroic, progressive narrative,
an ‘official story’, in which planning is the hero, ‘slaying the dragons of greed
and irrationality and, if not always triumphing, at least always noble, on the
side of angels’ (p. 35). In her view, this ‘official story’ is deeply flawed. As
she puts it,
The boundaries of planning history are not a given. These boundaries shift in
relation to the definition of planning . . . and in relation to the historian’s
purpose . . . The writing of histories is not simply a matter of holding a mirror
up to the past and reporting on what is reflected back. It is always a
representation, a textual reconstruction of the past rather than a direct
reflection of it. (Sandercock, 1998: 36–7)
In her view, this has produced an absence of diversity and of any critical/
theoretical perspective in planning history. ‘Perhaps the most glaring
omission from the saga of the rise of planning’, she claims,
is the absence of all but white, professional, males as the actors on the historical
stage. Were there no women? No African Americans, Mexican Americans,
Japanese and Chinese Americans? Were there no gays and lesbians? Where are
they, both as subjects . . . and as objects, victims, of planners’ neglect of or
desire to regulate these groups’ particular existence, concerns, and needs in
cities? (Sandercock, 1998: 37)
In Sandercock’s view, planning historians need to begin telling a more
inclusive history of cities, one that includes what she calls ‘insurgent
planning histories’. To do that, planners will have to develop a new kind of
‘multicultural literacy’, which will require familiarity with the multiple
histories of urban communities. To use Eckstein’s (2003) language, the chal-
lenge is to make space for these diverse community stories and to juxtapose
them in a way that transforms understandings and transforms relationships
among diverse geohistorical readers.
Finnegan then collects and narrates ‘storied lives’; that is, personal stories
that are pinned to Milton Keynes and that are narrated with the specificities

of time, place, and person. These storied lives are similar to the ‘practice
stories’ that John Forester has been writing about professional planners. His
stories help us understand how planners construct their understandings of
their subject positions within the global-scale web of relationships. In his
1999 book, The Deliberative Practitioner, Forester claims that the stories
planners tell one another about their work (their ‘practice stories’) matter.
From these stories, planners learn how to be planners and how to work with
others in the messy world of planning practice. But he also describes a second
type of practice story. These are ‘profiles’ of practitioners’ work. After
recounting ‘Kirstin’s’ story, Forester concludes that planners are ‘reflective
practitioners’ who, pressed by the real-time demands of work, learn through
stories about ‘the fluid and conflictual, deeply political and always surprising
world they are in’ (Forester, 1999: 26). From another story (the planners’
staff meeting), Forester concludes that planners are also ‘deliberative prac-
titioners’ who learn through engagement with others.
Forester (1999) further argues that these practice stories ‘do work by
organizing attention, practically and politically, not only to the facts at hand
but to why the facts at hand matter’ (p. 29). Planners do not simply present
facts and express opinions and emotions; they also ‘reconstruct selectively
what the problems at hand really are’ (Forester, 1999: 30). Such planners do
not have time to learn through sustained research, and they have to make
value judgements and set priorities, so they must learn not just from scien-
tific inquiry but also through a process that is akin to learning from friends.
In Forester’s view, we learn from stories like we learn from friends; they
speak in ways that are appropriate to the planner’s situation, they help the
planner deliberate, and they help the planner see his (or her) own interests,
cares and commitments in new ways. They help the planner understand not
just how the world works, but how the planner works, who the planner is,
and what sorts of things matter to him (or her). They typically try to do
justice to the complexities the planner faces rather than offering simplistic
cure-alls or technical fixes. Lastly, practice stories help the planner learn by
presenting him (or her) with a world of experience and passion, of affect
and emotion. They allow the planner to talk about fear, courage, outrage,
resolve, hope, cynicism, and all the other political passions of planning.
Persuasive stories about creating sustainable places have to make
space for diverse locally anchored common urban narratives
There is much value in Finnegan’s treatment of locally anchored common
urban narratives and of storied lives, especially when juxtaposed against
Sandercock’s and Forester’s use of stories. But much more can be done with
it, especially in terms of relating it to Buell’s five dimensions of place-
connectedness and my earlier arguments about planning as persuasive
storytelling in a global-scale web of relationships. I would suggest that at
least five broad narratives are commonly told about urban areas in America

in addition to the urban theorists’abstract story about global capital and the
planners’ ‘official story’ about fulfilling destiny. To imagine and create
sustainable places, planners have to make space for these and other locally
grounded common urban narratives.
One constructs the city as a site of opportunity and excitement, a center
for artists and other creative people. If you want to be somebody, you must
– this story claims – go to the bright lights and big city. If you do not believe
me, just watch the urban imaginary proffered by Home Box Office’s wildly
successful cable television show, Sex and the City.
Although this story has many tellers, members of locally rooted ‘growth
machines’ (Logan and Molotch, 1996) tell it with the greatest enthusiasm.
They assert that ‘growth strengthens the local tax base, creates jobs,
provides resources to solve existing problems, meets the housing needs
caused by natural population growth, and allows the market to serve public
tastes in housing, neighborhoods, and commercial development’, and that
growth and its effects are aligned with ‘the collective good’ (Logan and
Molotch, 1996: 318). In Logan and Molotch’s view, growth machine advo-
cates want to ensure a good business climate; that is, a place in which there
is no violent class or ethnic conflict, the work force is sufficiently quiescent
and healthy, and – most important – local publics favor growth and support
the ideology of value-free development. According to Logan and Molotch,
growth advocates use that presumed consensus and insistence on the need
for a good business climate to eliminate any alternative vision for the
purpose of local government or the meaning of community; that is, to elim-
inate or marginalize competing stories that might threaten growth.
A second common urban narrative constructs the city as a nightmare:
cities losing population, seething with drug-related criminal activity, experi-
encing riots like that of Miami’s Liberty City in 1980 and Los Angeles in
1992, suffering diminished employment, facing a shrinking tax base, losing
the white middle class, and watching housing and infrastructure deteriorate
and be abandoned. (Flee! Flee! Migrate out! Move to another place!) This
story of the city as nightmare has become deeply rooted in American
culture (see Beauregard, 2003b). Just think of the movies Bladerunner and
Escape from New York. Better yet, walk through the heart of Detroit or St
Louis and experience the combined effects of slum clearance, urban
renewal, high-rise public housing, interstate highway construction, immi-
gration, segregation, abject poverty, business disinvestment, and the
abandonment and torching of buildings.
A third common urban narrative – which often emerges from the black
urban experience – constructs the city as a site of injustice, oppression, and
exclusion (but also hope). Drawing heavily on her knowledge of Detroit, for
example, June Manning Thomas (1994, 1997) argues that one cannot
comprehensively understand the history of American cities, and their
planning, without understanding the African-Americans’ experience. That
experience began when hundreds of thousands of southern black workers

migrated northwards between the First and Second World Wars, seeking
opportunity and fleeing oppression, only to be met by racially restrictive
zoning ordinances and covenants and by white riots against blacks. The
black urban experience then involved having public housing, urban renewal,
and interstate highway projects confine blacks within existing ghettos or
displace them from land that the local growth machine wanted for other
uses. Confined to ghettos and alienated by decades of racially insensitive
policies, black neighborhoods exploded in violence during the 1960s
decade of ‘civil rebellion’. And now blacks find themselves in a racially
divided metropolis, living in the heart of the city as nightmare, which for
them often feels like a city of oppression. According to this story, when
African-Americans try to escape the city of oppression by moving to the
suburbs, they are greeted with exclusionary zoning policies. As Kirp et al.
(1995) put it, when the residents of middle-class suburban neighborhoods
hear the phrase ‘affordable housing’ they think: ‘lots of very poor and black
outsiders on welfare are coming to Mount L aurel from places like Camden,
and they will bring violence and drugs, and they will wreck our schools. They
will destroy our way of life’ (p. 47). Though awash in a tide of urban decline,
Thomas says, many black politicians and communities strive heroically to
preserve and improve their neighborhoods. Thus the city of despair and
oppression can also become a city of empowerment and action.
A fourth story offers the environmentalists’ interpretation. According to
it, the city is a site of activities that are rapidly eroding the ecological base
upon which those activities are founded. Cities, human progress, and all they
entail are rapidly destroying or taming wild nature. I think of it as the city of
boiling frogs. In this tale, the people of a city are like the frog that has been
tossed into a pot of temperate water. The frog never notices that the water
is gradually heating up, eventually to the boiling point and to the frog’s death.
Like the boiling frog, the people of a city gradually over-consume resources
and pollute their environment until the city (and the global-scale web of life,
or ‘organic machine’, in which it is embedded) becomes no longer livable.
And a fifth story might be called the city of ghosts. This offers a narrative
of memory, of loss, of small towns drying up and blowing away, of farmland
disappearing from the urban fringe, of neighborhoods being destroyed by
urban renewal and interstate highway construction, of other neighborhoods
being eviscerated by deindustrialization.11 In these cities of ghosts, people
recall how lively and hopeful their older towns and neighborhoods used to
be, and they seek to preserve what remains from any further demographic,
economic, and environmental change. But the preservationists’ story is
often complicated by the fact that their towns and neighborhoods have
already changed. Howell Baum (1997) provides an example with his story
about the effort of the people of South-east Baltimore to develop a neigh-
borhood plan. According to Baum, those neighbors believed quite strongly
in one straightforward ethical principle: that all community members should
have an opportunity to help envision the neighborhood’s future. But in

practice they were not able to adhere to that principle. Renters, poor
people, and blacks that had moved into the neighborhood over the previous
20 years either did not participate or else were not thought of as part of the
community. Instead, white professional middle-class people who thought of
themselves as being ‘goodhearted homeowners’ dominated the process.
The result was a conflict between the long-time residents’ ‘community of
memory’ and the actual, diverse residents’ potential ‘community of hope’.
Thus conflicted, the neighbors were not able to think seriously about their
present and anticipated problems.
Persuasive stories about creating sustainable places have to
negotiate emotional conflicts
How can planners and others make space for these and other locally
grounded common urban narratives, and how can they do so in a way that
enriches and transforms them without imposing uniformity upon them?
This is a difficult question. Sociologist Joseph E. Davis (2002) points to the
nub of the difficulty when he observes that stories call participants ‘not so
much to reflect on the merits of coherent arguments or self-consciously
adopt an interpretive scheme . . . but to identify with real protagonists, to
be repelled by antagonists, to enter into and feel morally involved in
configurations of events that specify injustice and prefigure change’ (p. 25).
In other words, by dealing with emotion as well as intellect, stories question
their senses of identity and community. This can frighten many people. But
from a narrative point of view, it is precisely that conflict and emotional
resonance that potentially gives storytelling such importance and power. As
John Kotre (1984/1996) observes in his study of narrative psychology,
stories can be generative: ‘If a new culture is coming into existence, that
story will emerge as a prototype that establishes a myth capable of ener-
gizing future adherents’ (Kotre, 1984/1996: 224). We choose to tell certain
stories because they matter to us, and we tell them in certain ways because
those ways of telling feel right. Good planner–storytellers will tap those
emotions (joy, sadness, hope, anger, fear), drawing upon the visual arts,
music, poetry, and street theater to construct and tell stories that help the
people of specific places imagine desirable transformations, long for the
transformations, feel inspired to act, believe that their actions will prove
effective, and create a ‘sustainable economy of spirit’ (LeBaron, 2002;
Throgmorton, 2000). Planners should tell these stories on their own auth-
ority, but the only way they can gain their diverse readers’ trust, the only
way the planners’ stories can be considered legitimate, is by making space
for their readers’ diverse understandings and contextualizations.

Conclusion
On the whole, the preceding critiques and perspectives reinforce the claim
that planning is a form of persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the
future. But they also suggest ways in which the initial claim should be
revised. Let me conclude by summarizing those revisions.
Planners’ stories about the future will necessarily have to begin from a
contestable normative position. To be persuasive to a wide range of
readers, however, the planners’ stories will have to make narrative and
physical space for diverse locally grounded common urban narratives.
They will have to recognize that planners and other geohistorical readers
spatialize their stories in diverse ways. They will have to juxtapose those
narratives against one another in a way that defamiliarizes the place. And
they will have to enable the actual geohistorical readers of transnational
places to engage in fruitful dialogue with their fellow strangers. This
revised argument acknowledges, indeed presumes, that powerful actors
will strive to eliminate or marginalize competing stories, and that those
powerful actors will induce some planners to devise plans (stories about
the future) that are designed to persuade only a very narrow range of
potential audiences.
None of this will be simple. Moreover, it is not possible to know in
advance where the interaction of these stories will lead. So we need the
courage to act, and we need to be inspired by the hope that our actions will
prove fruitful.
You are troubled by the course your city-region has taken. Seeking to turn it in
a better direction, you join several other people in an innovative planning
forum. Meeting in a beautiful but accessible spot, and guided by a trained
facilitator/mediator, you participate in several exercises over a four-day period.
One of the exercises involves telling your version of the city-region’s story to
the other people. The facilitator divides the group into four pairs. You sit
facing your ﬁrst partner, and the two of you condense your stories into tight
three-minute tales. Having done so, you move to a new partner and share
stories with her. You then turn to a third partner and share stories with him.
Having told your story three times, you observe that, although your basic story
has not changed, the detailed telling of it has; you recalled other key events
and changed the emphasis on particular moments. But then the facilitator
instructs you to narrate your story in such a way as to intentionally evoke a
strong and important feeling (joy, grief, anger) in the listener without telling
the listener what that feeling is supposed to be. As you do so, you realize that
your story is changing signiﬁcantly. Then the facilitator says, tell your story in a
way that evokes the opposite feeling. Now inspired by a different emotion,
your story changes dramatically. Then the facilitator instructs you to omit a
key event or person from your story. It changes once again. Finally, you tell
your story as if your big dream – that which you’ve always hoped your

city-region could be – has already become part of regional life. After telling
this version, you feel exhilarated and charged with energy. At the end of the
day, you realize that you have just experienced something quite moving.
A transformative experience.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Barbara Eckstein, John Forester, John Friedmann,
Seymour Mandelbaum, Leonie Sandercock, Huw Thomas, and two anony-
mous reviewers for offering their comments on an earlier draft of this
article. I would also like to thank Ben Davy and Walter Grunzweig at
Dortmund University, and Linda Chapin of the Orange County, Florida,
Board of Supervisors for inviting me to present much earlier versions of it.
Notes
1. For other good recent treatments of storytelling in planning, see Croucher
(1997), Forsyth (1999), and Hamin (forthcoming). For additional insight into
the role of narrative in the social sciences, especially with regard to how
narratives construct memory, identity, and community, see Hinchman and
Hinchman (1997). For the role of narrative in social movements, see Davis
(2002).
2. Finnegan (1998) considers a story to be ‘essentially a presentation of events or
experiences which is told, typically through written or spoken words’ (p. 9).
3. As Denis Wood (1992) shows, even the most ‘objective’ maps are constructed
with purposes in mind. And as James C. Scott (1998) argues so persuasively,
many ‘facts’ are socially constructed, primarily through the creation of
categories that are subsequently used to guide the collection of facts.
4. For a good contemporary example, see Hopkins (2001).
5. Surely we could all agree that July is a hot month. Well, not if you live in
Melbourne, Australia. Context matters.
6. Dear (2000) characterizes it as ‘a pluralistic pastiche of plausible alternative
theoretical visions’ (p. 32) and ‘a Babel of incommensurable narratives’ (p. 53).
7. You, the actual geohistorical readers, might, for example, resist being
conscripted as the ‘you’ referred to in the opening vignette of this essay.
(There’s no way I would be caught dead telling my life story to total strangers!
Who can afford to spend time away from work and family to do something as
indulgent as this!)
8. Gare (1995) argues it is necessary to create an image of the future that enables
individuals to ‘relate their own lives to a new grand narrative, the global
struggle for an environmentally sustainable civilization’ (p. 160). Following
Mikhail Bakhtin, he suggests that the new narrative should be a ‘polyphonic,
dialogical narrative in which a multiplicity of perspectives are represented,
where through dialogue the narrative reﬂects on its own development’ (Gare,

1995: 140). While there are similarities between Gare’s argument and mine, I
want to distance myself from the claim that we should impose a new ‘grand
narrative’ on others.
9. According to De Certeau (1984), urban users tell stories that ‘carry out a labor
that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places’ (p. 116).
10. According to Bruno Latour, these subject positions provide ‘oligopticons’ that
enable people to gaze in some directions but not in others, to experience
localized totalities and partial orders (see Amin and Thrift, 2002: 92). There
are also distinct similarities between this and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of
habitus: ‘Each ﬁeld’, he says, ‘. . . involves its own agents in its own stakes,
which, from another point of view, the point of view of another game, become
invisible or at least insigniﬁcant or even illusory’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 97). ‘The
agent engaged in practice knows the world’, he claims, ‘but . . . [h]e knows it, in
a sense, too well, without objectifying distance, takes it for granted, precisely
because he is caught up in it, bound up with it; he inhabits it like a garment [un
habit] or a familiar habitat. He feels at home in the world because the world is
also in him, in the form of a habitus’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 142–3).
11. See Rotella (2003) for an analysis of nostalgic stories about ‘the old
neighborhood’ of Chicago’s South Side. These stories are closely connected to
‘the politics of return’, wherein some people seek to recapture or
reterritorialize a lost or threatened ‘homeland’ (Smith, 2001: 152).
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Eckstein and J.A. Throgmorton (eds) Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice,
and Possibility for A merican Cities, pp. 13–36. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Finnegan, R. (1998) Tales of the City: A Study of Narrative and Urban L ife.
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Flyvbjerg, B. (1998) Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Forester, J. (1999) The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory
Planning Processes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Forsyth, A. (1999) Constructing Suburbs: Competing Voices in a Debate over
Urban Growth. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers.
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gare, A.E. (1995) Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis. London: Routledge.
Hamin, E. (forthcoming) Stories of the L and: Interpretive Planning and the Mojave
National Preserve. Harrisonburg, VA: Center for American Places.
Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
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Washington, DC: Island Press.
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L.C. Dalton and F.S. So (eds) The Practice of L ocal Governmental Planning,
pp. 141–70. Washington, DC: International City/County Management
Association.
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the Soul of Suburbia. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
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New York: W. W. Norton.
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Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.
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L andscape. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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Planning Theory 14(Winter): 8–33.

LeBaron, M. (2002) Bridging Troubled Waters: Conﬂict Resolution from the Heart.
San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
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and S. Campbell (eds) Readings in Urban Theory, pp. 291–337. Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
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Graf Publishers.
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(eds) Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility for A merican
Cities, pp. 87–110. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
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Chichester: Wiley.
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Princeton University Press.
Scott, J.C. (1998) Seeing L ike a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Smith, M.P. (2001) Transnational Urbanism: L ocating Globalization. Cambridge:
Blackwell.
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Blackwell.
Soja, E. (2003) ‘Tales of a Geographer-planner’, in B. Eckstein and J.A.
Throgmorton (eds) Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility
for A merican Cities, pp. 207–24. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Thomas, J.M. (1994) ‘Planning History and the Black Urban Experience: Linkages
and Contemporary Implications’, Journal of Planning Education and Research
14(1): 1–11.
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Detroit. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Throgmorton, J.A. (1996) Planning as Persuasive Storytelling: The Rhetorical
Construction of Chicago’s Electric Future. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
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Skilled-voice-in-the-ﬂow of Persuasive Argumentation’, Journal of the
A merican Planning A ssociation 66(4): 367–79.
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Throgmorton (eds) Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility
for A merican Cities, pp. 39–61. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
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Research 22(2): 178–87.
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Construction of Chicago’s Electric Future’, Journal of the A merican Planning
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James Throgmorton has been teaching urban and regional planning at the
University of Iowa since 1986. He is the author of Planning as Persuasive
Storytelling (University of Chicago Press, 1996), co-editor (with Barbara
Eckstein) of Story and Sustainability (The MIT Press, 2003), and author of
numerous articles. In the mid-1990s, he served as an elected member of the
City Council of Iowa City, Iowa.
A ddress: Graduate Program in Urban and Regional Planning, The
University of Iowa, 347 Jessup Hall, Iowa City, IA 52242–1316, USA. [email:
james-throgmorton@uiowa.edu]

Chapter 2
From the Campfire to the Computer:
An Epistemology of Multiplicity and the Story
Turn in Planning
Leonie Sandercock
2.1 Introduction
Not long after joining my present university in 2001, I was shocked to hear that a
Native woman who proposed to do her Masters thesis by focusing on the stories
of her people had been told that that was not an appropriate topic or methodol-
ogy. For the longest time, ‘story’ was thought of in the social sciences (though not
in the humanities) as ‘soft,’ inferior, lacking in rigor, or, worst insult of all, as a
‘woman/native/other’ way of knowing.1 There was even a time, in the academic dis-
cipline of history (my own starting point as an undergraduate), in which story was
demoted and more ‘analytical’ and quantitative approaches were sought. In response
to this kind of marginalizing of story, feminists, historians, and workers in the cul-
tural studies field, not to mention anthropologists, have reasserted its importance,
both as epistemology and as methodology (Kelly, 1984; Lerner, 1997; Rabinow &
Sullivan, 1987; Geertz, 1988; Trinh, 1989). Yet the struggle to create a legitimate
space for the use of stories in planning curricula and scholarship as well as in plan-
ning’s diverse practices is ongoing, because of the privileging of what are seen as
more scientific and technical ways of knowing. (We shouldn’t be forced to choose
between stories and the so-called more rigorous, typically quantitative research, sto-
ries and census data, stories and modeling, because all three ‘alternatives’ to story
are actually each imbued with story). Nevertheless, a ‘story turn’ is well under way
in planning.
Accompanying a broader post-positivist movement in the social sciences
(Stretton, 1969; Geertz, 1988; Rabinow & Sullivan, 1987; Bourdieu, 1990;
Flyvbjerg, 2002), pushed further along by feminist and postcolonial critiques (see
Said, 1979; Hooks, 1984; Trinh, 1989; Sandercock, 1998), planning scholars have
begun to see the need both for an expanded language for planning and for ways
of expanding the creative capacities of planners (Landry, 2000, 2006; Sandercock,
L. Sandercock (B)
School of Community and Regional Planning, The University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, BC, Canada
e-mail: leonies@interchange.ubc.ca
17L. Sandercock, G. Attili (eds.), Multimedia Explorations in Urban Policy and
Planning, Urban and Landscape Perspectives 7, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3209-6_2,
C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

18 L. Sandercock
2005a, 2005b; Sarkissian & Hurford, 2010) by acknowledging and using the many
other ways of knowing that exist: experiential, intuitive, and somatic knowledge;
local knowledge; knowledge based on the practices of talking and listening, seeing,
contemplating, and sharing; and knowledge expressed in visual, symbolic, ritual,
and other artistic ways.
The ‘story turn’ in planning has been one response to this epistemological crisis.
In the past two decades, a growing number of planning scholars have been investi-
gating the relationship between story and planning and consciously trying to create
the space for this other ‘language’ (Forester, 1989; Mandelbaum, 1991; Marris,
1997; Sandercock, 1998, 2003; Eckstein & Throgmorton, 2003; Attili, 2007). These
investigations highlight how planning is performed through stories, how rhetoric
and poetics are crucial in interactive processes, how the communicative dimension
is central to planning practices, and how story can awaken energies and imagina-
tions, becoming a catalyst for involving urban conversations, for deep community
dialogues.
Fig. 2.1 A planning imagination for the 21st century. Photo by Maurizio Monaci. Graphic
elaboration by Giovanni Attili
In order to imagine the ultimately unrepresentable spaces, lives, and languages
of the city, to make them legible, we translate them into narratives. The way we
narrate the city becomes constitutive of urban reality, affecting the choices we make
and the ways we then might act. As Alasdair MacIntyre put it: ‘I can only answer
the question “What am I to do” if I can answer the prior question, “of what story or
stories do I ﬁnd myself a part?” ’ (quoted in Flyvbjerg, 2002, p. 137).
My argument in this chapter will be deceptively simple. Stories are central to
planning practice: to the knowledge it draws on from the social sciences and human-
ities; to the knowledge it produces about the city; and to ways of acting in the city.
Planning is performed through story, in a myriad of ways. And since storytelling
has evolved from oral tales around a campﬁre to the technologically sophisticated

2 From the Campfire to the Computer 19
forms of multimedia available in the early 21st century, it is surely time for the
urban professions to appreciate the multifarious potential of these new media. All
the more so since the planning and design fields have been forced by the demands
of civil society to be more engaged with communities, and thus necessarily to be
more communicative.
In this chapter I perform two tasks. First, I unpack the many ways in which
we use stories in planning and design: in process, as a catalyst for change, as a
foundation, in policy, in pedagogy, in critique, as justification of the status quo, as
identity, and as experience. Second, I trace the evolution of storytelling techniques
‘from the campfire to the computer,’ leading to the suggestion that multimedia is
fast becoming the 21st century’s favored form of storytelling and to illustrate its
many applications to the planning field.
My approach is not uncritical. Despite increasing attention to and use of story
in some of the newer academic fields (feminist and cultural studies, for example), I
don’t see it as the new religion, and I take to heart Eckstein’s caution that stories’
ability ‘to act as transformative agents depends on a disciplined scrutiny of their
forms and uses’ (Eckstein, 2003, p. 13). We still need to question the truth of our
own and others’ stories. We need to be attentive to how power shapes which stories
get told, get heard, carry weight. We need to understand the work that stories do, or
rather that we ask them to do, in deploying them and to recognize the moral order-
ing involved in the conscious and unconscious use of certain plots and character
Fig. 2.2 A planning imagination for the 21st century. Video stills from the multimedia production
‘A planning imagination for the 21st century’ by Giovanni Attili

20 L. Sandercock
types. A better understanding of the role of stories can make us more effective as
planning practitioners, irrespective of the substantive field of planning. Story and
storytelling are at work in conflict resolution, in community development, in par-
ticipatory action research, in resource management, in policy and data analysis, in
transportation planning, and so on. A better understanding of the role of stories can
also be an aid to critical thinking, to deconstructing the arguments of others. Stories
can sometimes provide a far richer understanding of the human condition, and thus
of the urban condition, than traditional social science, and for that reason alone,
deserve more attention.
Story is an all-pervasive, yet largely unrecognized force in planning practice. We
don’t talk about it, and we don’t teach it. Let’s get this out of the closet. Let’s liberate
and celebrate and think critically about the power of story and appreciate why there
is a ‘story turn’ underway in the planning field.
2.2 Planning as Performed Story
I turn first to the ways in which I see planning as performed story: in process,
in foundational stories, in stories as catalysts for change, in policy, and finally, in
academic stories, as method, as explanation, and as critique.
2.2.1 Story and Process
For many planning practitioners, the role of story is central, although not always
consciously so. Those who do consciously make use of story do so in diverse, and
often imaginative and inspiring, ways. The best way to demonstrate this is by using
some examples – of story as process and of story being used to facilitate process.
These examples are so varied that I’ll use subheadings as guides.
2.2.1.1 Community Participation Processes
In community or public participation processes, planners orchestrate an event in
such a way as to allow everybody, or as many people as possible, to tell their story
about their community, neighborhood, school, or street. We tend to refer to this as
drawing on local knowledge, and there are various techniques for eliciting people’s
stories, such as small group work with a facilitator for each group or doing commu-
nity mapping exercises.2 What is not always clear is how these collected stories will
be used in the subsequent process, but the belief operating here is that it is impor-
tant for everybody to have a chance to speak and to have their stories heard. This is
linked with an argument about the political and practical benefits of democratizing
planning.
When a participatory event is a way of starting a planning process, its purpose
is most often about getting views and opinions, so the story gathering is likely to be

followed by an attempt to find common threads that will help to draw up priorities.
But when the participatory event is a response to a preexisting conflict that needs
to be addressed before planning can move ahead, then the gathering of rival stories
takes on more import. In such a situation, practitioners will usually meet separately
with each involved person or group and listen to their stories of what the problem
is before making a judgment about when and how to bring the conflicting parties
together to hear each other’s stories. In extreme cases, where the conflict is long-
standing, relating to generations or even centuries of oppression or marginalization,
this is very difficult work, but when done well can be therapeutic, cathartic, even
healing.
2.2.1.2 Mediation, Negotiation, and Conflict Resolution
In one growing branch of planning practice – mediation, negotiation, and conflict
resolution – there is a raft of techniques and procedures for facilitating storytelling,
and the hearing of stories, in conflict situations.3 In this kind of work, the ability of
a practitioner to make the space for stories to be heard is more important than the
ability to tell stories. And it is here that the importance of listening to others’ stories,
and the skills of listening in cross-cultural contexts, is at a premium:4
In telling stories, parties tell who they are, what they care about, and what deeper concerns
they may have that underlie the issues at hand (Forester, 2000, p. 166).
Forester describes a case in Washington State, where the mediator, Shirley
Solomon, brought together Native Americans and non-Native county officials to set-
tle land disputes. A critical stage in that mediation was the creating of a safe space
in which people could come together and ‘just talk about things without it being
product-driven’ (Solomon, quoted in Forester, 2000, p. 152). Solomon ceremonial-
ized this safe space by creating a talking circle and asking people to talk about what
this place meant to them. Everyone was encouraged to tell their story, of the mean-
ing of the land, the place, to them and their families, past, present, and future – the
land whose multiple and conflicting uses they were ultimately to resolve. It was
this story-ing that got people past ‘my needs versus your needs’ and on to some
‘higher ground,’ moving toward some common purpose. Solomon describes this
stepping aside to discuss personal histories as both simple and powerful, as a way
of opening surprising connections between conflicting parties. Or as Forester has
it, storytelling is essential in situations where deep histories of threatened cultural
identity and domination are the context through which a present dispute is viewed.
Stories have to be told for reconciliation to happen (Forester, 2000, p. 157). In terms
of process, too, the design of spaces for telling stories makes participants from dif-
ferent cultures and class backgrounds more comfortable about speaking and more
confident about the relevance of the whole procedure. A tribal elder who was present
at Solomon’s mediation said to her: ‘In those meetings where it’s Roberts Rules of
Order, I know that I either have nothing to say, or what I have to say counts for
nothing’ (quoted in Forester, 2000, p. 154).

22 L. Sandercock
2.2.1.3 Core Story
Another interesting development of the use of story in practice is what Dunstan and
Sarkissian (1994) call ‘core story.’ The idea of core story as methodology draws
on work in psychology, which suggests that each of us has a core story: that we do
not merely tell stories but are active in creating them with our lives. We become
our stories. When we tell stories about ourselves, we draw on past behavior and
on others’ comments about us in characterizing ourselves as, say, adventurous, or
victims, or afraid of change, or selﬁsh, or heroic. But in telling and re-telling the
story, we are also reproducing ourselves and our behaviors. Social psychologists
argue that communities, and possibly nations, have such core stories that give
meaning to collective life (see Houston, 1982, 1987). Culture is the creation and
expression and sharing of stories that bond us with common language, imagery,
metaphors, all of which create shared meaning. Such stories might be victim sto-
ries, warrior stories, fatal ﬂaw stories, stories of peace-making, of generosity, of
abandonment, of expectations betrayed.
In their work in evaluating the success of community development on a new
outer suburban estate developed by a public agency in an Australian city, Dunstan
and Sarkissian (1994) used an array of research tools: attitude and satisfaction sur-
veys, interviews, focus groups, as well as census and other ‘hard’ data. When they
came to analyze this material, they found contradictions that were not likely to be
resolved by collecting more details. In order to go beyond the details and the quan-
titative scores on ‘satisfaction,’ they explored the notion of core story, drawing on

heroic, mythic, and meta-poetic language. They scripted such a story of heroic set-
tlers, of expectation and betrayal, of abandonment, and took the story back to the
community, saying ‘this is what we’ve heard.’ The response was overwhelming, and
cathartic. ‘Yes, you’ve understood. That’s our story.’ The task then, as the social
planners deﬁned it, was to help the community to turn this doomed and pessimistic
story around. They asked them how they thought their story might/could/should be
changed. Underlying this was a belief that core stories can be guides to how com-
munities will respond to crisis or to public intervention. As with individuals, some
tragic core stories need to be transformed by an explicit healing process or else the
core story will be enacted again and again. Renewal and redemption are possible,
Dunstan and Sarkissian believe. New ‘chapters’ can be written if there is the collec-
tive will to do so. They suggest four steps toward renewal. The ﬁrst is a public telling
of the story in a way that accepts its truth and acknowledges its power and pain. The
second is some kind of atonement, in which there is an exchange that settles the
differences. The third is a ceremony or ritual emerging out of local involvement and
commitment by government (in this case municipal and provincial) that publicly
acknowledges the new beginning. The fourth is an ongoing commitment and trust
that a new approach is possible and will be acted on Dunstan & Sarkissian (1994,
pp. 75–91).
This fascinating case study offers some illumination to a more general puzzle in
participatory planning: how to turn a raft of community stories into a trustworthy

24 L. Sandercock
plan, one that is faithful to community desires. To turn the light on inside the black
box of that conversion surely requires planners to take their plan back to the commu-
nity and say, ‘this is how we converted your stories into a plan. Did we understand
you correctly?’ In a community or constituency where there is only one core story,
this is a more straightforward process than in a situation where what the planners
have heard is two or more conflicting stories. In the latter situation there is far more
working through to do, in order to prioritize and to reach some consensus about
priorities.
2.2.1.4 Non-verbal Stories
Less ‘verbal’ storytelling approaches have been developed using people with com-
munity arts experience to be part of a community development project that creates
the opportunity for residents to express their feelings and tell their story vividly
and powerfully. The Seattle Arts Commission matches artists with communities to
engage in just such projects. At their best, they can create a new sense of cohesion
and identity among residents, a healing of past wrongs, and a collective optimism
about the future.
A community quilt, and quilting process, has proved to be a successful way to
bring people together and for a group to tell their story. Depending on the commu-
nity involved in an issue, video or music, or other art forms, may be more powerful
forms of storytelling. In his violence-prevention work with youth in the Rock Solid
Foundation in Victoria, British Columbia, Constable Tom Woods initiated a project
to create an outdoor youth art gallery and park site along a 500-m stretch of railway
right-of-way between two rows of warehouses. This area, which had a long history
as a crime corridor, is now home to the Trackside Art Gallery, where local youths
practice their graffiti on the warehouse walls. Woods realized that these teenagers
needed a safe site for their graffiti. More profoundly, he realized that they needed a
space to express themselves through nonviolent means and that graffiti is a commu-
nicative art form, a form of storytelling (McNaughton, 2001, p. 5). The potential of
planners working with artists in processes like these that encourage storytelling has
only just begun to be tapped (Sarkissian & Hurford, 2010).
2.2.1.5 Future Stories
Peter Ellyard is another consultant who uses story in an imaginative way in his
‘preferred futures process.’ Working with an array of clients, from institutions and
corporations to place and interest-based communities, he helps them to develop their
own ‘future myth,’ a preferred future scenario; he then takes them through a process
of ‘backcasting’ or reverse history, as they unfold the steps from the future back
to the present, which got them to where they want to be. On the way, there are
missions, heritages, disasters, triumphs, and pitfalls. He consciously employs these
narrative devices as an aid to imagination. Once the future myth task is complete,
they proceed to SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analyses and
to the development of capacity-building strategies and action plans (Ellyard, 2001).

What is emerging then is the use of story in both obvious and imaginative ways
in planning processes: an ability to tell, listen to, and invent stories is being nurtured
as well as the equally important ability to make the space for stories to be heard.
Part II of this book illustrates an explosion of interest in the role of new media in
story gathering and storytelling.
2.2.2 Story as Foundation, Origin, Identity
I’ve already discussed the notion of core story and how it might be used by plan-
ners. There’s a related notion of foundational story, a mytho-poetic story of origins,
a story that cities and nations tell about themselves. This is particularly relevant
to planning in multiethnic, multicultural contexts in which conflicting notions of
identity are at play. In the winter of 2002 I was working in Birmingham at the invi-
tation of the consulting firm Comedia (Charles Landry and Phil Wood), who had
been hired by the City Council. Partly in response to race riots in other northern
British cities in the preceding summer, Birmingham’s politicians were concerned
about ‘getting it right’ in relation to ‘managing’ ethnic diversity. As we met with
various groups in the city, from the city planning staff to workers in a variety of
community development programs, to young black men and Muslim women, we
began to hear very different versions of Birmingham’s identity. There was a fairly
widely accepted founding story on the part of some Anglo residents (who referred
to themselves as the ‘indigenous’ population) that Birmingham was an English city
(not a multicultural city) and that those who were there first had greater rights to
the city than the relative newcomers from the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean,
and so on. This profoundly political question of the city’s changing identity clearly
needed the widest possible public debate. I suggested that at some point the city was
going to have to rewrite its foundational story, to make it more inclusive and open
to change. The city’s planners were very much implicated in this debate. At the
community coalface, and especially in non-Anglo neighborhoods, these predomi-
nantly Anglo-Celtic planners were either reproducing the founding story of ‘British
Birmingham’ or helping to change that story by making their policies and programs
reflect and respect the diversity of the ‘new city.’
This is not an isolated example anymore, but a situation increasingly common
across Europe in this age of migrations. The need to collectively change (and rep-
resent in the built environment itself) these old foundational stories is one of the
contemporary challenges facing planners.
2.2.3 Story as Catalyst for Change
Stories and storytelling can be powerful agents or aids in the service of change, as
shapers of a new imagination of alternatives. Stories of success, or of exemplary
actions, serve as inspirations when they are retold. I’ve lost count of the number

26 L. Sandercock
of times I have told ‘the Rosa Parks story,’5 either in class or in a community
or activist meeting, when the mood suddenly (or over time) gets pessimistic and
people feel that the odds are too great, the structures of power too oppressive and all-
encompassing. When Ken Reardon tells or writes his East St. Louis story (Reardon,
2003), he is among other things conveying a message of hope in the face of incred-
ible odds. This ‘organizing of hope’ is one of our fundamental tasks as planners,
and one of our weapons in that battle is the use of success stories, and the ability
to tell those stories well, meaningfully, in a way that does indeed inspire others to
act. My chapter in Part II of this book describes how I have been using the docu-
mentary, ‘Where Strangers Become Neighbours’ (Attili & Sandercock, 2007), as an
inspirational catalyst in community development workshops in different Canadian
cities.
Depending on the context, though, success stories may not be enough to disrupt
existing habits of thought and bring about profound change, as we’ve seen in the
last two examples. We may need different kinds of stories: stories that frighten,
stories that shock, embarrass, defamiliarize (Eckstein, 2003). Giovanni Attili and I
are currently making just such a ﬁlm, about race relations in two small communities
in northern British Columbia, Canada (Sandercock & Attili, 2010).
Deciding what stories to tell in what circumstances is part of the planner’s art.
The puzzle of how to change the stories that people tell themselves everyday, often
repeating familiar stories from the media, absorbing and internalizing the messages

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