ABSTRACT
The statements by Park and Massey reflect two different visions of how the city’s narrative complexity functions: as diverse city worlds that closely interact or that, in Park’s view, are merely casually touching each other. The challenge of planners is to be aware of the narrative complexity within which they operate, to be able to survey, to incorporate, and to foster the city’s repository of multiple narratives. Planners are involved in a form of “persuasive storytelling” that looks backwards, by defending particular choices, as well as forwards, in the way they project visions of the future. They act within a broad ecology of narratives, including media narratives, everyday citizen narratives, and cultural representations of space. A narrative mapping, which aims to chart an area in terms of the stories it has generated, will put a particular focus on metaphor, plot, and the relationships between the location and personal or communal development.
