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Planning Theory & Practice

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Out of the Closet: The Importance of Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice

Leonie Sandercock

To cite this article: Leonie Sandercock (2003) Out of the Closet: The Importance of Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice, Planning Theory & Practice, 4:1, 11-28, DOI: 10.1080/1464935032000057209

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1464935032000057209

Published online: 04 Apr 2011.

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Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 4, No. 1, 11–28, 2003

Out of the Closet: The Importance of Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice LEONIE SANDERCOCK

ABSTRACT This article argues that story has a special importance in planning that has neither been fully understood nor sufficiently valued. Planning is performed through story, in a myriad of ways. The aim here is to unpack the many ways we use story: in policy, in process, in pedagogy, in critique, as a foundation, and as a catalyst for change. A better understanding of the work that stories do can make us better planners in at least three ways: by expanding our practical tools, by sharpening our critical judgment and by widening the circle of democratic discourse.

Introduction

Allow me to introduce you to Martha Quest, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s novel The Four-Gated City (1969). Martha is a Marxist intellectual recently arrived in 1950s London from Rhodesia. She sees London as socially deprived and ugly. For Iris, however, a local woman with whom Martha is staying, the neighborhood is a living archive, textured and animated by layers of history and memory (Donald, 1999, p. 122).

Iris … knew everything about this area, half a dozen streets for about half a mile or a mile of their length; and she knew it all in such detail that when with her, Martha walked in a double vision, as if she were two people, herself and Iris, one eye stating, denying, warding off the total hideousness of the whole area, the other, with Iris, knowing it in love. With Iris, one moved here in a state of love, if love is the delicate but total acknowledgement of what is … Iris …had lived in this street since she was born. Put her brain, together with the other million brains, women’s brains, that recorded in such tiny loving anxious detail the histories of windowsills, skins of paint, replaced curtains and salvaged baulks of timber, there would be a recording instru- ment, a sort of six-dimensional map which included the histories and lives and loves of people, London—a section map in depth. This is where London exists. (quoted in Donald, 1999, p. 122)

Martha, we might say, ‘knows’ London through theory. Iris knows it through immer- sion, through all of her senses, through empathy and love. In the paragraph quoted there is an implicit epistemology of the city, a distinctly feminist epistemology, which is at first sight appealing. It outlines a way of knowing the city through the senses and emotions

Leonie Sandercock, University of British Columbia, 6333 Memorial Road, Vancouver V6T 1Z2, BC, Canada. Email: [email protected]

1464-9357 Print/1470-000X On-line/03/010011-18  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1464935032000057209

12 L. Sandercock

rather than through (Marxist) theory. In the declaration of the last sentence, “This is where London exists”, there is a truth claim, a claim that to really know the city you need to know the stories in the heads of its entire female population. If we take this literally (which of course we are not meant to) then it is obviously ridiculous, since we could never know the stories of all those ‘other million brains’. But even if we did, we would still have to interpret them, make our own sense of them. Is it even true, as a generalization, that inside women’s heads there exists a particular kind of knowledge about the city? And why is that knowledge, Iris’s perspective in the novel, inherently more valuable than Martha’s more analytical perspective? My own answer to this last question is that it is not, that both are valuable and that it is not helpful to think of these different ways of knowing the city as mutually exclusive, or as superior/inferior. But that is the way ‘story’ is usually thought of, as ‘soft’, as a woman’s way of knowing, as inferior, lacking in rigor.

In response to this kind of marginalizing of story in the social sciences, feminists and others have reasserted its importance, both as epistemology and as methodology. What I want to argue in this article is that story has a special importance in planning that has neither been fully understood nor sufficiently valued. In order to imagine the ultimately unrepresentable space, life 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, the ways we then might act. My argument will be deceptively simple. Stories are central to planning practice: to the knowledge it draws on from the social sciences and humanities; 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. I want to unpack the many ways in which we use stories: in process, as a catalyst for change, as a foundation, in policy, in pedagogy, in explanation and critique as well as justification of the status quo, and as moral exemplars.

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 do not see it as the new religion. 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 ordering involved in the conscious and unconscious use of certain plots and character types. I believe that 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 story telling are at work in conflict resolution, in community development, in participatory 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 often provide a far richer under- standing of the human condition, and thus of the urban condition, than traditional social science, and for that reason alone, deserve more attention.

In short, I want to make two bold arguments in this article. One is about the importance of story in planning practice, research, and teaching. The other is about the crucial importance of story in multicultural planning. Much of what planners do, I will argue, can be understood as performed story. Yet the importance of story has rarely been understood, let alone validated in planning. Story is an all-pervasive, yet largely unrecognized force in planning practice. We do not talk about it, and we do not teach it. Let us get this out of the closet. Let us liberate and celebrate and think about the power of story. Let us appreciate its importance to the 21st century multicultural

Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice 13

planning project, as a way of bringing people together to learn about each other through the telling of stories.

How Stories Work

Very few scholars within the planning field have investigated the work of story in planning, and even then, only aspects of it (Forester, 1989, 1993, 1999; Mandelbaum, 1991; Marris, 1997; Throgmorton, 1996; Eckstein & Throgmorton, 2003). In coming out of the closet about the importance of story, I want to be systematic about the ways, implicit and explicit, in which we use story, and to demonstrate what I mean when I say that planning is performed through story. But first something needs to be said about story itself, because ‘story’ conveys a range of meanings, from anecdote, to exemplar, to something that is invented rather than ‘true’, in the sense of strictly adhering to widely agreed-on facts. All three of these meanings are present and demonstrable in the way story is used in planning. In their most developed form, stories have certain key properties, and here I draw on my film school training, and also on Ruth Finnegan (1998), to sketch five of them. First, there is a temporal or sequential framework, which often involves a ticking clock to provide dramatic tension. Second, there is an element of explanation or coherence, rather than a catalogue of one thing after another. Third, there is some potential for generalizability, for seeing the universal in the particular, the world in a grain of sand.1 Fourth, there is the presence of recognized, generic conven- tions that relate to an expected framework, a plot structure and protagonists. Aristotle’s Poetics was our bible on this subject in film school. We learned from him that stories have plot as well as characters, both equally important: and that stories have a beginning, middle and end, a shape or structure. Fifth, moral tension is essential to a good story.

I want to expand on the second and fourth points. A lot has been written about the second point, the element of coherence or explanation. Literary, folklore and myth analysts have argued that there are a number of widely recognized plots: most obvi- ously, the hero’s tale, the rags-to-riches tale, the fall from grace, the effects of villainy, the growth to maturity, the Golden Age lost, the pioneer’s tale, the stranger comes to town, and, the young man leaves home in order to find himself/make his place in the world/escape from the provincial straightjacket. What do these have to do with stories in and about planning? Let us take a few examples.

(1) The conflict between settlers and indigenous peoples in New World countries over land uses and land rights. For indigenous peoples there is a core story that is about paradise lost or an expulsion from paradise. For the settlers, the core story is the pioneer’s tale of bravery and persistence in the face of adversity.

(2) The story of the young man leaving home to escape the provincial straightjacket. This may evolve into the urban story of the young gay man who seeks out the big city to find a community of those like him, as well as to feel the freedom of anonymity. Or it may become the story of a squatter settlement in the hills outside town or on the banks of a river, or a homeless encampment in skid row on the edge of downtown. Each of these is a story in which planners get involved at some point.

(3) The Golden Age lost. This is a story that recurs in writings about communities and their destruction. Sometimes the villains in this plot are developers. Other times, they are planners.

And so on. Stories in and about planning, even the most seemingly abstract, embody one or more of these recognizable plots.

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What about the fourth element of story, generic conventions relating to framework and types of protagonist? Planning or urban stories may seem far more limited in their range of protagonists than fictional stories, because the protagonists often take the form of impersonal forces, (such as capitalism, globalization or the alienation of urban life), but there are also individuals who are seen as embodying these forces (such as wicked developers, alienated gang members, noble community activists) and are portrayed as villains or heroines. In other words, the moral ordering of the more familiar fictional genres is equally present in stories in and about planning (Finnegan, 1998, pp. 9–13).

If we think about the East St. Louis story as told by Ken Reardon (Reardon, 1998, 2003), it is possible to see all five story conventions at work. There is a ‘temporal sequence’ that begins when the University of Illinois is challenged in the State House regarding its community service work, and proceeds through early tentative efforts to do something, followed by setbacks, turning points, crises, obstacles and finally reaches dramatic resolution when we learn that a decade later, $45 million in funds has been committed to the revitalization of the hitherto abandoned neighborhood. There is certainly an ‘element of explanation’. In Reardon’s version, this achievement was primarily the product of the faith of certain community leaders, and secondarily the result of hard work on the part of community members. There is ‘potential for generalizability’ in the way that Reardon draws lessons from this story that may have applicability for other poor communities as well as for university/community partner- ships. There is the presence of the ‘generic conventions of plot and character’. At one level, the ‘plot’ is about de-industrialization and globalization, abstract and impersonal forces, but it is also about community resistance and mobilization, coalition building, and the triumph of the human spirit. There are individuals who embody some, but not all, of these abstract forces. The ‘noble community activists’ have names and brief biographies, as do the ‘few good men’ who come forward to invest in the community with public or private funds, whereas those who had abandoned the community remain unnamed villains. Finally, the moral ordering of the story is clear. Faith produces a will to act. The capacity to act is enhanced by the university/community partnership. There is also blindness/self-deception in the university’s involvement, and that has to be overcome, through the courage and honesty as well as compassion of the community leaders. An ethic of service to others drives the story …

I want to turn now 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.

Planning as Performed Story

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. But these examples are so varied that I will use sub-headings as guides.

Community participation processes. In community or public participation processes, plan- ners 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

Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice 15

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. 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 important 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.

If 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. If, on the other hand, the participatory event is a response to a pre-existing 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 others 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

Mediation, negotiation, and conflict resolution. In one growing branch of planning prac- tice—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. It is here that the importance of listening to others’ stories, and the skills of listening in cross-cultural contexts, is at a premium.

Forester describes a case in Washington State where the mediator, Shirley Solomon, brought together Native Americans and non-Native county officials to settle 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 ceremonialized 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 meaning 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 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 different 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).

Core story. Another interesting development of the use of story in practice is what Dunstan & 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

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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 courageous. 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 stories, 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 & Sarkissian used an array of research tools: attitude and satisfaction surveys, 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 quantitative 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 settlers, 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 the community how they thought their story might/could/should be changed. Underlying this was a belief that core stories can be guides to how communities 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 & Sarkissian argue. New chapters can be written if there is the collective will to do so. They suggest four steps towards 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 involve- ment 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 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 community storytellers 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.

Non-verbal stories. Depending on the community involved in an issue, video, music or other art forms, may be powerful forms of story telling. 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

Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice 17

500-metre 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 non-violent means, and that graffiti is a communicative art form, a form of story telling (Macnaughton, 2001, p. 5). The potential of planners working with artists in processes like these that encourage story telling has scarcely been tapped.

What emerges 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.

Story as Foundation, Origin, Identity

I have discussed the notion of core story and how it might be used by planners. There is 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. Look at Australia. The foundational story that Anglo-Australians have been telling for the past 200 and some years concerns the arrival of the brave Captain James Cook, who landed with the First Fleet at Botany Bay in 1788 to establish a colony, and of subsequent heroic pioneers who explored and tamed the land, a familiar story in new world settler societies. On one level this story is mytho-poetic, but on another it is also politico-legal. The founding institutions, and specifically the system of land ownership, were based on the legal concept of terra nullius, that is, empty land. This concept rendered invisible the previous 60 000 years of indigenous occupation, as well as their continued presence on the continent.

Towards the end of the 20th century, growing numbers of non-indigenous as well as indigenous Australians grew increasingly uncomfortable with this founding fiction. Momentum grew for the rewriting of the story of origins. Many of those concerned with celebrating nation-building at the turn of the 21st century wanted to tell a more complex origins story, and the foundational myth became contested terrain. Part of the battle was legal and was fought through the High Court. Another part was symbolic and emotional, concerning apology and atonement. That was handled in part by the placing of ‘Sorry Books’ in all public libraries across Australia. Anyone who wished to could sign one of these books, and thereby publicly apologize to the Aboriginal people for their dispossession. There were also a series of ‘Sorry Day’ marches throughout 2001, one in each capital city. Half a million people participated in Sydney and 300 000 in Melbourne. The refusal of the Prime Minister (since 1996), John Howard, to make an official apology on behalf of the government continues to anger many Australians, and to be seen as unfinished business in the reconciliation process.

Having participated in the Melbourne march, this was lurking in the back of my mind in the winter of 2002 when I was working in Birmingham, at the invitation of 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 I met with various groups in the city, from the city planning staff to workers in a variety of community development programmes, to young black men and Muslim women, I began to hear very different versions of Birmingham’s identity. There was a fairly widely accepted founding story on the part of some Anglo

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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 re-write its foundational story, to make it more inclusive, and open to change. The planning staff were very much implicated in this debate. At the community coalface, and especially in non-Anglo neighborhoods, these predominantly Anglo-Celtic planners were either reproducing the founding story of ‘British Birming- ham’, or helping to change that story by making their policies and programmes 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 represent in the built environment itself) these old foundational stories is one of the contemporary challenges facing planners.

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. In my own practice I have used stories in this very obvious way, discovering early on in my planning life (as a research student) that even within one city, it was often the case that one neighborhood had no idea that another neighborhood was fighting, or had recently fought, the very same battle, and had come up with creative ways of doing this. When people are immersed in local battles, they are often so locally focused that they have no idea what’s happening elsewhere. To discover that some other neighborhood or social movement in your city or country has won some similar battle can be inspiring and galvanizing, and I have found myself in the role of relating such stories and becoming a galvanizing agent. As the world gets smaller, being the teller of stories of how people elsewhere have faced similar or even more dire adversity, and triumphed, is a role I increasingly and sometimes surprisingly find myself playing. When I was invited to Johannesburg in 2000, I was nervous because I felt that I was going into a context in which I had no experience and not much understanding. I could not ‘pronounce’ on issues there. But I could tell stories about struggles elsewhere and, just as the rest of the world has been inspired by Nelson Mandela, so too were South Africans moved and inspired by the struggles that I described in East St. Louis and Sydney. There were processes embedded in those stories that I told, from which people could learn, get ideas, reflect on. The only skill that I bring to this is some sense, some judgment, about which stories are appropriate in what circumstances, and some sense of what constitutes, and how to tell, a good story.

Stories of success, or of exemplary actions, serve as inspirations when they are re-told. I have lost count of the number of times I have told ‘the Rosa Parks story’,4 either in class, in a community or activist meeting, when the mood 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, he is amongst other things conveying a message of hope in the face of incredible 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.

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In multicultural contexts, there is usually a dominant culture whose version of events, of behavior, and practices, are the implicit norm. It is also usually the case that those engaged in planning, as a state-directed activity, are members of the dominant culture, and therefore less likely to recognize, let alone question, dominant cultural norms and practices. For a society to be functionally as well as formally multicultural, those norms occasionally have to be held up to the light and examined and challenged. One effective way to do that is through story. Canadian planner Norman Dale has written of the critical importance of hearing the stories of the Haida Gwaii (an indigenous community on the Northwest coast of Canada) in what was meant to be a cross-cultural community economic development project in the Queen Charlotte Islands, sponsored by the provin- cial government (Dale, 1999). After a series of formal meetings with local residents, Dale was struggling to create a space in which the lone Haida representative (whose name was Gitsga) would feel empowered to say anything. Gitsga seemed to have taken a vow of silence, and was on the verge of pulling out of the consultation process when Dale sought him out and encouraged him to return. At the next consultation meeting, there was some informal chat among the white people, before the real meeting began, about the artistic and environmental merits of a sculpture that had been erected on a rock offshore. It had not occurred to anybody to ask the Haida people what they thought. When Gitsga broke his silence to volunteer the information that the rock was sacred to the Haida, there was genuine shock and consternation, leading to an opening up of the whole community economic development planning process to the involvement of the Haida. Planners have a tremendously important role in acknowledging the voices of minority groups, designing meetings in which such groups are comfortable speaking, and encouraging them to speak.

I have one more example of the use of story in planning practices, in the process of policy analysis, formulation, and implementation, before I turn to academic storytelling about planning.

Story and Policy

Here I am aided by my colleagues James Throgmorton and Peter Marris, each of whom has done a lot of thinking about the connections between story and policy. In Witnesses, Engineers and Storytellers: Using Research for Social Policy and Community Action (1997), Peter Marris argues that the relationship between knowledge and action is not straight- forward, and that knowledge itself cannot, has not ever, determined policy. In analyzing various types of and approaches to social policy research, Marris asks why so little of the research produced on poverty, for example, has affected policy. His answers are several. One is that academics are powerful critics but weak storytellers. That is, they fail to communicate their findings in a form that is not only plausible but persuasive. (By contrast, he notes that community actors have great stories to tell, but no means of telling them, except to each other. So the wrong stories win the debates.) Storytelling, he says, is the natural language of persuasion, because any story has to involve both a sequence of events and the interpretation of their meaning. A story integrates knowledge of what happened with an understanding of why it happened and a sense of what it means to us. Stories organize knowledge around our need to act and our moral concerns. The stories do not have to be original, but they must be authoritative (that is, provide reliable evidence marshaled into a convincing argument). The best are both original and authoritative.5

To be persuasive, the stories we tell must fit the need as well as the situation. Policy

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researchers compete with everyone else who has a story to tell, and their special claim on public attention lies in the quality of their observation as well as the sophistication of the accumulated understanding through which they interpret their data. But this truthfulness is not, in itself, necessarily persuasive. Good stories have qualities such as dramatic timing, humor, irony, evocativeness and suspense, in which social researchers are untrained. “Worse”, says Marris, “they have taught themselves that to be entertain- ing compromises the integrity of scientific work” (Marris, 1997, p. 58). Writing up policy research is hard work: it is hard to tell a good story while simultaneously displaying conscientiously the evidence on which it is based. However, Marris insists, the more social researchers attend to the storyteller’s craft, and honor it in the work of colleagues and students, the more influential they can be. We have to be able to tell our stories skillfully enough to capture the imagination of a broader and more political audience than our colleagues alone.

There are two notions of story at work here. One is functional/instrumental: bringing the findings of social research to life through weaving them into a good story. The other is more profound: storytelling, in the fullest sense, is not merely recounting events, but endowing them with meaning by commentary, interpretation and dramatic structure.

While Marris seems to confine his advocacy of storytelling to the publishing of research results, James Throgmorton’s work addresses the next step, the arts of rhetoric in the public domain of speech and debate. The lesson he wants to impart is that if we want to be effective policy advocates, then we need to become good story-makers and good storytellers, in the more performative sense. In Planning as Persuasive Storytelling (1996), Throgmorton suggests that we can think of planning as an enacted and future- oriented narrative in which participants are both characters and joint authors. We can think of storytelling as being an appropriate style for conveying the truth of planning action. However, what should be done, he asks, when planning stories overlap and conflict? How can planners (and other interested parties) decide which planning story is more worthy of the telling?

Throgmorton (1996, p. 48) draws on Fisher’s concept of narrative rationality in claiming that humans are storytellers who have a natural capacity to recognize the fidelity of stories they tell and experience. We test stories in terms of the extent to which they hang together (coherence) and in terms of their truthfulness and reliability (fidelity). But Throgmorton is unhappy with this, reminding us of situations in which two planning stories, both of which are coherent and truthful, compete for attention. What then makes one more worthy than another? Throgmorton suggests that the answer to this question lies in part at least in the persuasiveness with which we tell our stories. Planning is a form of persuasive storytelling, and planners are both authors who write texts (plans, analyses, articles) and also characters whose forecasts, surveys, models, maps, and so on, act as tropes (figures of speech and argument) in their own and others’ persuasive stories. A crucial part of Throgmorton’s argument is that this future-oriented storytelling is never simply persuasive. It is also constitutive. The ways in which planners write and talk shape community, character and culture. So a critical question for planners is what ethical principles should guide and constrain their efforts to persuade their audiences.

Marris’s and Throgmorton’s work has very important implications for policy research and recommendations. If planners want to be more effective in translating knowledge to action, they argue, then we had better pay more attention to the craft of story telling in both its written and oral forms. That means literally expanding the language of planning, to become more expressive, evocative, engaging, and to include the language of the

Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice 21

emotions. “Academic story telling”, writes Finnegan, “is ugly in its stark, clichéd monotone manner. We tell the dullest stories in the most dreary ways, and usually deliberately, for this is the mantle of scientific storytelling: it is supposed to be dull” (Finnegan, 1998, p. 21). What Finnegan alleges of academic story telling is equally true of bureaucratic story telling. Policy reports produced by government planning agencies, and also by consultants for those agencies, are cut from the same clichéd cloth. They are dry as dust. Life’s juices have been squeezed from them. Emotion has been rigorously purged, as if there were no such things as joy, tranquility, anger, resentment, fear, hope, memory and forgetting, at stake in these analyses. What purposes, whose purposes, do these bloodless stories serve? For one thing, they serve to perpetuate a myth of the objectivity and technical expertise of planners. In doing so, these documents are nothing short of misleading at best, (dishonest at worst), about the kinds of problems and choices we face in cities.

To influence policy, planners need to learn story, or rather, an array of storytelling modes. But where to learn it? What is the academy teaching?

Story as Critique and/or Explanation

There is a false binary in our heads that separates planning documents, social scientific research and theorizing, from storytelling, rather than allowing us to appreciate the ways in which each of these employs story. Planning documents, from maps, to models, to GIS, to plans themselves, do in fact all tell a story. Sometimes the story is descriptive, or poses as descriptive, ‘this is how things are’, ‘these are the facts’. But there is no such thing as mere description, or pure facts. There is always an author, the planner as policy analyst, who is choosing which facts are relevant, what to describe, what to count, and in the assembling of these facts a story is shaped, an interpretation, either consciously or unconsciously, emerges. Facts are usually marshaled to explain something and to draw some conclusions for action.

Scholars also use story in their critical writings about cities and planning, sometimes consciously, but usually not. Even unconsciously, however, academic urban stories, even the most seemingly abstract, often exhibit some of the five familiar properties of story that were described in the introduction, drawing on familiar plot lines. There are heroes and antiheroes, victims and other familiar character types: the witch figure/demon of international capitalism; the two-faced fairy of progress; the insubstantial and ambigu- ous trickster called postmodernity; and the darling love, long-lost, but in some stories found again, of community (Finnegan, 1998, p. 21). There is a temporal ordering, often on a grand scale, taking us from pre-industrial to industrial to post-industrial cities, or from deindustrialization to the knowledge economy and the space of flows. The most familiar plot is change itself, and the desire to explain it.

Along with the explaining usually comes a valuing. Things were better before, or after, such and such, which then suggests we should go backwards or forwards. Evocative plots, of rural superseded by urban, community by alienation, tradition by modernity, or community triumphing over capital, residents over bureaucracies, squatters over the forces of law and order, are moving stories with which individual readers can identify, positioning themselves in a larger historical narrative. There are stories of times of transition, of new eras, of an old order passing, of lost Golden Ages. There are also some stories, but not many, which foretell a happy ending, if only … If only ‘we’ would do such and such, then we could live happily ever after.

In other words, academic urban stories and theories evoke basic narrative plots that

22 L. Sandercock

are familiar to us from other contexts (from fairy tales to movies) and which resonate with us morally as well as intellectually, satisfying or disturbing or challenging us. My point here is not to say that these stories are therefore worthless. On the contrary, they are illuminating and instructive precisely because of these underlying plots, which are all exercises in valuing human activities, in a moral ordering of life and social organiza- tion. As with planning documents, the more alert we can be to the underlying story or stories, the better we are able to evaluate them. We need to understand the mechanisms of story, both in order to tell good stories ourselves, and to be more critical of the stories we have to listen to.

As with the myths of other cultures, our planning and academic stories function as sanction and justification for the current order, but also as launching pads for counter- versions. Academic stories about planning usually take sides, although not always overtly. Sometimes the side that is being taken is revealed by asking the question, of any narrative, what stories are missing here? In Making the Invisible Visible (1998), I critiqued what I call the ‘Official Story’ of planning’s history, by pointing out what that story leaves out. The ‘Official Story’ portrays planning as a heroic pursuit, often without any fatal flaws, always on the side of the angels, and those who oppose it as irrational, reactionary, or just plain greedy. What this leaves out are the gender, class, race and cultural biases of planning practices; the ways in which planning has served as an agent of social control, regulating (certain marked) bodies in space; and the many stories of oppositional practices, grass roots planning by excluded groups, in opposition to a state-directed mode of planning that has always disadvantaged them.

To imagine the future differently, we need to start with history, with a reconsideration of the stories we tell ourselves about the role of planning in the modern and postmodern city. In telling new stories about our past, our intention is to reshape our future. If we can uncouple planning history from its obsession with the celebratory story of the rise of the planning profession, then we may be able to link it to a new set of public issues, those connected with a dawning appreciation of a multicultural heritage and the challenge of planning for a future of multicultural cities and regions.

The multicultural city cannot be imagined without a belief in inclusive democracy and the diversity of social justice claims of the disempowered communities in existing cities—communities of migrants, indigenous peoples, poor people. If we want to work towards a policy of inclusion, then we need to start from a sound understanding of the exclusionary effects of planning’s past practices and ideologies. If we want to plan in the future for and with a heterogeneous public, acknowledging and nurturing the full diversity of all the social groups in the multicultural city, then we need to develop a new kind of multicultural literacy. An essential part of that literacy is familiarity with the multiple histories of urban communities, and the multiple histories of newcomers, especially as those histories intersect with struggles over space and place claiming, with planning policies and resistances to them, with traditions of indigenous planning, and with questions of belonging and identity and difference.

Story and Pedagogy

There are a variety of ways of using story in pedagogy: that is, specifically in the training of planners. I will mention a number of them, and then concentrate on the contribution of one outstanding educator. It is not new for planning educators to use story in the form of role play in the classroom, (or in problem-solving workshops). The intention is to nudge people beyond their own horizons, into the worlds of others with whom they are

Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice 23

in conflict. I have a number of reservations about role play. One is that the effect of asking participants to take on roles with which they are unfamiliar, or opposed to, may simply be to mobilize the worst kind of stereotyping of others’ views and positions and behaviors. Another is that some people feel extremely uncomfortable having to be anybody but themselves. This may be more than shyness. For example, the mediator Shirley Solomon, in the case discussed earlier in this article, tells how in one case the attempt at a role play turned into a near-disaster. “The people couldn’t get into it because they just wanted to be themselves … all these people are very much engaged in these issues, and it’s passionate for them. They learned not at all from having to take the other’s role … One of the tribal leaders never got it, couldn’t get into it, and just couldn’t believe that he wasn’t able to represent himself …The (county) general manager was asked to be a developer. He just didn’t want to be a developer. So he tried to do it for a while and then just got aggravated with it” (Solomon, in Forester, 2000, pp. 158–159).

I have been inspired by new teaching ideas that emerged from feminist studies in the 1980s. During my decade teaching graduate students in the Urban Planning Program at UCLA I used the device of ‘life stories’ as a way to explore difficult issues of identity and difference. My students, in their diversity, mirrored the social and cultural diversity of that city, and this occasionally led to tensions in classes. I began each semester asking students to write short stories about the ways that race, gender, ethnicity or disability, had shaped their lives. We then shared those stories in class, and drew on them during the semester, as a way of connecting the personal with the political. I have also used the idea of a ‘housing autobiography’ when teaching undergraduates about housing issues, asking students to craft a story about the houses they have lived in and how that might have shaped their ideas of the ideal house and neighborhood. When I did this at the University of Melbourne, with students from Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia in class as well as Anglo-Australians, it worked very well in bringing out cultural and class stereotypes of the ‘normal’ house and neighborhood. In general, I have found that the more creative I can be in the classroom (by using music, images, and so on) the more creative is the response of my students in their own papers and in their thinking. They start connecting unusual things, thinking laterally, which is definitely what is needed from planners in the 21st century. It was partly feminism, partly my film school experience, and partly the need to find as many ways as possible to connect with my multicultural student group that led me to experiment with story. The results, in terms of wonderful papers and presentations from my classes, have taught me a lot about the creativity that so often lies dormant, undernourished or even discouraged, through our academic straightjackets of ‘appropriate’, ‘objective’, ‘scientific’ papers.

For two decades, the outstanding planning educator John Forester has been a tireless story-gatherer, collecting the details of the working days and lives of a wide range of practitioners in North America and a handful from Israel and Europe, using interviews to get them to describe what it is that they do, always in terms of action rather than theorizing. With minimal editing, these ‘work stories’ have been published both as transcripts for pedagogical purposes and also, with detailed commentary and interpret- ation, incorporated into Forester’s books as the foundation of his understanding of and theorizing about planning (Forester 1989, 1999).6

Over the past decade, Forester has been dogged in his pursuit of understanding of difference in planning. I see his larger project as an attempt to reshape planning as a practice of deliberative democracy. But as part of that quest, he recognizes “the challenges of a multicultural planning practice—the ability to anticipate and respond

24 L. Sandercock

sensitively and creatively to complex differences of standpoint, background, race and gender, cultural and political history” (Forester, 2000, p. 147). His underlying concern, as I interpret his recent work, has been puzzling over what it means to ‘respect difference’. He sees the danger of respect conceived as the mere acceptance or appreciation of difference: in that form, respect can stymie dialogue and mutual learning. He is acutely aware that planning conflicts are often about more than resources (such as land, money, facilities). They are also about relationships, and this involves not only personality and politics, but also race, ethnicity, and culture. To learn about how to work successfully in such cross-cultural or multicultural situations, he has sought out practitioners with good stories to tell. One such story, that can do double duty for me in writing here about pedagogy and story in multicultural contexts is the work of Marie Kennedy, who teaches community development planning at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

Kennedy’s undergraduate students are primarily of a working-class background, urban, and older (average age 39). The class works with grass roots community organizations in the Boston area, around issues defined by those organizations, and in the process, students learn planning skills. The project that Kennedy describes in her interview (Forester et al., 1993, pp. 110–122) was in the city of Sommerville, adjacent to Cambridge, near Boston, population around 100 000. Sommerville was in transition from a predominantly white ethnic working-class district to a city with a significant new immigrant population, as well as a new liberal/radical, more educated white group who were moving in from Cambridge. (This latter group had become politically active and pushed the agenda of Sommerville as a Sanctuary City).7 In the previous 10 years the population had changed from 95 per cent white ethnic working class to 25 cent foreign born (Haitian, Vietnamese, Central American) and this was accompanied by increasing racial tension and incidence of racial violence. Kennedy was approached by the Mystic Welcome Project, an organization of newcomers in the Mystic housing project, the largest public housing project in Sommerville. The question was how to build, or rebuild, a sense of community co-operation and support in this neighborhood. There was also the challenge of how to bring together several neighborhood-based organiza- tions in the same area who had nothing to do with each other. For Kennedy the agenda was clear. “We are explicitly going in with an agenda to build a healthy multi-racial, multi-ethnic community. So the goal is out front. We will have many discussions, and some of them will be heated” (Forester et al., 1993, p. 118).

What I want to draw from this story is how Kennedy prepared her students to work in this situation. The students themselves were diverse in terms of age, gender, race and ethnicity, and mostly working class. For the first month (of a one year course) she met with the students and concentrated on their own attitudes towards immigrant communi- ties and newcomers, and their own attitudes towards Sommerville as a place. “We spend the initial time getting their biases and preconceptions on the table … I feel strongly that no matter who we are, we bring our previous experience, our baggage, our preconcep- tions with us into any planning situation. The first step is to get real clear about what you are bringing … You can either set your baggage aside in order to clearly hear and listen to other people’s experience, or you can check it out against other people’s opinions and against facts to see whether your preconception is born out or not” (Forester et al., 1993, p. 113).

The students all individually took walking tours through the neighborhood and had to figure out how the neighborhood affected them, whom they saw there, what racial and ethnic and socio-economic groups, what they saw in the physical environment, what their assumptions about it were, whether they thought it would or would not be a ‘nice’

Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice 25

place to live. Kennedy got all the students to write about Sommerville, and to write about their attitude to newcomer groups and individuals. The writing was done anonymously, and discussed collectively. There was a lot of disagreement among students about their impressions. What came out in the discussions was how different students’ backgrounds (growing up, or not, in a public housing project; living, or not, in a neighborhood of newcomers, and so on) had shaped their reflections on Sommerville. Students were asked to think about the experience of becoming a minority newcomer, maybe the only family that is different from the now-majority community. Some could draw on their backgrounds as minority members to talk about this, and educate their fellow (white) students. Gradually this led into discussions on housing policy, immi- gration policy, a needs analysis of the area, and so on. But a whole semester was spent in this kind of preparation, before the students started to work with the community group, in the community.

This is a deeply informative account of what it takes to work as an agent of social change in a changing neighborhood, and how important it is to examine one’s own preconceptions. It gives us some idea of the detailed personal work that needs to be done in preparation for working in multicultural environments. In this learning stage, the stories that students tell about themselves, and hear from each other, are crucial in peeling back layers of preconceptions and assumptions about ‘others’, and about physical, residential environments different from whatever one is accustomed to. In turn, when I read this account of Kennedy’s work, I learn new ways of approaching the training of community development planners. Her ‘work story’ helps my work. Forester’s gathering of such stories helps us all. Stories teach. But what do they teach?

Forester’s work, in spite of its empirical base, is both ethically and normatively saturated. Despite his disclaimer that “we sought no particular philosophy or style” when seeking out potential interviewees, he is not merely describing what planners do, in their own words. He wants planners to do good and make a difference, and he searches for stories from practitioners which demonstrate these possibilities (and corre- spond with his understanding of doing good). His purposes shape his collection of stories. His pedagogical aims in passing these stories on to his students are not simply to convey the skills of these practitioners but also to inspire his students with how those skills are used, that is, for what moral purposes. In Kennedy’s case, the purpose is building healthy multiracial, multi-ethnic communities. Herein is perhaps the oldest and most traditional use of stories, as moral exemplars.

Conclusions

There are of course limits to the power and reach of stories and storytelling in planning. Two need to be mentioned in closing. One concerns scale; the other, power itself. I am not claiming that storytelling works in situations of extreme conflict that divide nations, such as contemporary conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in India, or between Zionists and Palestinians in Israel. My examples are drawn from local and regional contexts and from scenarios in which planners have a role and some leverage. Nor am I claiming that storytelling is so powerful that it can or should replace other planning tools. Persuasive storytelling is one form of power at the disposal of planners, but it takes its place in a force field in which there are other powers at work, including the powers of misinformation, deception and lying, which are deployed by fellow planners as well as outside forces opposing planning interventions.8

26 L. Sandercock

Nevertheless, this article has argued that stories and storytelling are central to planning practice, that in fact we can think about planning as performed story. We have seen stories working as, and in, planning processes, where the ability to tell, to listen to, and to invent stories is being nurtured as well as the equally important ability to create/design the spaces for stories to be heard. When stories work as catalysts for change, it is partly by inspirational example, and partly by shaping a new imagination of alternatives. We have explored the notion of foundational stories that need to be rewritten, whether at the level of the nation, the city, or the neighborhood. We have heard how story could be critical in policy research and analysis, as well as how the mantle of scientific storytelling may actually handicap our policy causes. We have seen how academics use story, as explanation and as critique of planning practices, and how these stories too can make a difference, can uphold as well as question the status quo. We have explored various ways that stories are used in the training of planners, personal stories, practical stories, moving and inspiring stories. I have also suggested the crucial importance of story in multicultural planning, and demonstrated how particular applications of story contribute to the multicultural planning project.

But there are still too few practitioners or academics who are conscious of or creative about the use of story. My purpose in drawing attention to the centrality of story is, among other things, to suggest that the role of the storytelling imagination could be given far more prominence in the education of planners. A better understanding of the work that story does, or can do, and how it does it, could produce more persuasive plans and policy documents. It could help us to analyze such documents. The creative use of or responsiveness to stories in planning processes can also serve many purposes, including widening the circle of democratic discourse, and shifting participants in such discourses out of their entrenched positions and into more receptive or open frames of mind.

I am advocating both a creative and a critical approach to stories and storytelling. I have talked about the need to deconstruct the ‘official story’ in relation to planning history. Using stories in planning practice must be open to the same process of critique, including an alertness to the ways in which power shapes which stories get told, get heard and carry weight. Critical judgment will always be necessary in deciding what weight to give to different stories, as well as what stories are appropriate in what circumstances. The telling of stories is nothing less than a profoundly political act.

As cities become more multi-ethnic and multicultural, the need to engage in dialogue with strangers must become an urban art and not just a planner’s art, if we are concerned about how we can co-exist with each other, in all our difference. This most ancient of arts begins with the sharing of stories, and moves towards the shaping of new collective stories. “The storyteller, besides being a great mother, a teacher, a poetess, a warrior, a musician, a historian, a fairy, and a witch, is a healer and a protectress. Her chanting or telling of stories … has the power of bringing us together” (Minh-ha, 1989, p. 140).

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Bob Beauregard, Jim Throgmorton, John Friedmann and three anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of this article and constructive suggestions. In an expanded form, this article is Chapter 8 of my forthcoming Cosmopolis 2: Mongrel Cities and the 21st Century Multicultural Project (London, Continuum, 2003).

Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice 27

Notes

1. This is why I have always been interested in ‘gossip’ as an everyday way of knowing/interpreting the world, in which people exchange apparently small (but not trivial) stories and search out commonalities and differences, as a way of making sense of their world (see Spacks, 1985).

2. Forester (2000), Dale (1999) and Sandercock (2000) all detail such cases. 3. See Fowler & Mumford, 1999; LeBaron, 2002; Susskind et al., 1999; Thiagarajan & Parker, 1999). 4. Rosa Parks was the African American woman who, in Alabama in 1955, refused to move to the back of

the bus when white folks boarded. This act of civil disobedience turned into a year-long boycott of the bus service by Blacks, and gave birth to the Civil Rights Movement.

5. Marris cites Herbert Gans’ The Urban Villagers, and Michael Young & Peter Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London as good examples.

6. The eight volumes of edited transcripts, arranged by substantive content (e.g. ‘Mediation in Practice: Profiles of Community and Environmental Mediators’) are available from the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University.

7. That is, as a city welcoming of newcomers, with or without the legal papers. 8. For some hair-raising examples of how planners use their data dishonestly and deceptively, see Flyvbjerg

et al. (2002).

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