ABSTRACT
Co-authored with Barbara Buchenau, Chapter 7 , “‘Scripts’ in Urban Development: Procedural Knowledge, Self-Description and Persuasive Blueprint for the Future” introduces the concept of ‘scripts’ in urban development as persuasive combinations of these three components. The notion of ‘scripts’ proposed here draws on uses and implications of the term in a wide variety of disciplines and fields, which each contribute vital components to an understanding of how scripts function as a particularly powerful type of model: They often deliberately blur the descriptive and the normative characteristics of models and thus simultaneously function as models of and models for urban developments. We then draw on an ongoing collaborative research project on the transatlantic comparison of scripts in post-industrial urban transformations to (a) illustrate the implications of this type of research for the theory and practice of literary urban studies and (b) to point out how a surprisingly limited number of such scripts permute, intersect and reinforce each other in global urban developments.
