Urban planning involves using storytelling as a persuasive tool to engage communities. Storytelling allows diverse groups to find shared visions and helps opposing parties resolve issues by understanding different perspectives. Effective storytelling in planning identifies stakeholders, explores a community's identity, and fosters collaboration through building trust and empathy. Stories must be relevant to the intended audience in order to promote listening and participation. Planners can involve communities through collaborative storytelling approaches, digital tools that explore narratives, and experiential activities to develop a collective future.

1. URBAN PLANNING: AN ACT OF
PERSUASIVE STORYTELLING

2. WHAT ARE NARRATIVES?
 Express subjective and symbolic meaning, and connect it with real identities
 Enhance our ability to engage multiple voices
 Enable self-organizing processes

3. WHY ENGAGE COMMUNITIES THROUGH
STORYTELLING?
 Through the crafting of narratives, storytelling allows diverse players to find
common threads that bind them to a shared vision or allows opposing parties
to begin to work out catharsis and healing.
 To understand the problems that beleaguer a place and identify potential
resolutions, we have to study emplotment.

4. WHEN IS STORYTELLING USEFULL?
 To identify stakeholders
 To understand a community’s foundational narrative
 to facilitate stakeholder-based collaboration, promote trust and empathy, an
understanding of interdependencies

5. WHO TO USE IT WITH?
 “If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a
great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.” J. Steinbeck
 Must be adapted to the audience
 Very effective with people from strong oral cultures (example: indigenous
people, African immigrants, …)

6. HOW CAN WE ENGAGE COMMUNITIES THROUGH
STORYTELLING?
 Planning is less about authoritative guidance and more of a means for
communities to take turns creating and retelling partially shared stories and
weaving together a collective life out of their authentic lived experience
(Lejano and Wessells, 2006).
 narrative approaches underlie various methods that may be useful in
community engagement, (e.g., narrative ethnographies for evaluation) as well
as various newmedia tools (e.g., digital storytelling, scenario development,
computer game storyboarding) and experiential tools (planning for
neighborhood, walking tour,…) that may prove valuable in the community
engagement process.

7. SOURCES
• http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=durp_fac
ulty_publications
• http://ancommunity.wordpress.com/meetings/proposed-schedule-odj/
• http://persuasivestorytelling.wordpress.com/
• http://eprints.qut.edu.au/8813/1/8813.pdf