ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines more fully the concept of narratives for planning, illustrates by a tentative narrative mapping of literary narratives of the Helsinki waterfront. It examines early twenty-first-century planning of Helsinki and its shorelines as an example of narratives in planning. A taxonomy of the different kinds of narrative in the context of planning provides an important tool for distinguishing how particular kinds of narrative function, as well as for examining how stories “travel” from one context to the other. The analysis of planning narratives on the basis of such a typology has the potential to further expose questions of power, decision-making, and narrative legitimacy in planning processes. One course of inquiry would be to trace the trajectory of specific narrative elements from a localized, experiential context to the context of the planners and then onwards to a branding context, from which they feed back into the local context.
