THE JOY OF CITIES>Social Unity city CULTURE CORNER>Amstredam
Planning Cities through Collating, Constructing and Communicating Stories A worm s eye view of a place is vital to plan properly, states Anjali Karol Mohan
T
provisioning and planning for the formal, there is an overt focus on land-use allocation coupled with large infrastructure provision, administration and management. Land is viewed as an economic resource. Missing here is an acknowledgement of the natural systems, i.e. comprehending land as an ecological resource. Cumulatively, unprecedented urbanisation and its impact on ecological systems is overwritten by an existing fabric of socio-spatial inequities within which the application of existing frameworks of top-down planning only serve to disproportionately distribute ecological risks and exacerbate multi-dimensional poverty. Thus, enhancing the resilience of cities and societies via a democratised, decentralised, pro-poor, bottom-up planning aimed at inclusive and resilient cities is the need of the hour. A worm’s eye view planning lens, while conspicuous by its absence, is critical to informing the bird’s eye view. Storytelling (and attendant storyboarding) emerges as a critical tool in instituting a worm’s eye view enquiry and analysis. Collecting, constructing and communicating stories from the ground is invaluable in building a narrative of the city’s transformation. Using Ranchi, we construct ‘selective and purposeful’ stories, illustrated visually and spatially. The storyboards were arrived at through a combination of methods that included mapping the city and the settlements
Storytelling has an element of futuredirectedness where the past can aid in informing what needs fixing
A focus group discussion: Hatia at Ranchi
ALL PHOTOS & GRAPHICS: AUTHOR
here is a burgeoning scholarship that argues for storytelling as an important, yet undervalued tool for planning cities. While Van Hulst (2012)1 positions storytelling as a model for planning, for Throgmorton (2003)2 good planning can be a matter of persuasive storytelling about the future. Stories depict incidents, actors, events in a temporal and spatial setting and involve not just a mere narration of events. Rather, stories have the potential to ‘emplot the past’ while foregrounding their manifestations and implications for both the present and the future. Thus, storytelling has an element of ‘futuredirectedness’ where the past can aid in informing what needs fixing. That stories have the ability to talk about what is and what ought to be which renders them important methodological pathways to planning and managing contemporary cities. Planning in India (and many developing countries) structures cities along binaries of the formal and the informal. While the former is analysed, constructed and provisioned through a top-down (bird’s eye view) lens, the latter is largely invisible. The complexity and dynamism of the ground reality in general and the informal city in particular renders the bird’s eye view approach ineffective and insufficient. Consequently, the needs and aspirations of the most vulnerable rarely fall within the radar of the formal planning processes. Furthermore, in
26 | MY LIVEABLE CITY • Jul-Dec 2022
26-31-JOC_Constructing and Communicating Stories_AKmohan-Repro.indd 26
11/07/22 12:15 PM