Interface

Abstract

Multimedia and Planning: Introduction

Digital Ethnographies in the Planning Field

Video as a Tool in Community Engagement

Using Participatory Video to Enrich Planning Process

Film, Space and Place Identity: Reflections on Urban Planning

Multimedia and Planning:Commentary

Multimedia and Planning: Introduction

This Interface explores the potential applications of multimedia—that wide array of new information and communication technologies, but particularly of film and video—in the planning field. It is both an epistemological and pragmatic exploration.

I have argued elsewhere (Sandercock, 1998, 2003, 2005) about the importance of an epistemological shift in planning; about the need for an expanded language for planning; about expanding the creative capacities of planners; and about the centrality of story and storytelling in planning practice. Clearly these are all interwoven. If modernist planning was anchored by an Enlightenment epistemology that privileged scientific and technical ways of knowing, my argument has been about the importance of acknowledging and using the many other ways of knowing that exist: experiential, intuitive and somatic knowledges; local knowledges; knowledges based on practices of talking and listening, seeing, contemplating and sharing; and knowledges expressed in visual, symbolic, ritual and other artistic ways. An ‘epistemology of multiplicity’, as I named it, would nurture these other ways of knowing without discarding or dismissing more traditional forms of scientific and technical reasoning.

In planning's post-war rush to join the social sciences (then dominated by the positivist paradigm), some of its capacity to address important urban issues was lost because it turned its back on questions of values, of meaning and on the arts of interpretation and of city-building. The mental and emotional universe of planning was thus choked and caged. The notion of an expanded language for planning is a way to blow open this cage and release the chokehold. I have been searching for a language that can encompass the lived experience of our mongrel cities, the joys, hopes, fears, the senses of loss, expectation and adventure. I have suggested that we need to be more attuned to the city of spirit, the city of memory, and the city of desire: these are what animate life in cities, and also animate the urban conflicts in which we as a profession are engaged.

In arguing about the centrality of story and storytelling in planning practice I have been consciously trying to create the space for these other languages. In stressing the importance of a creative sensibility as central to a planning imagination for the 21st century, I seek to make planning processes less constipated and more lucid. As my farewell Interface, then, I want to share what I have been learning in recent years about the ways in which multimedia can advance all of these agendas. Thanks largely to my collaborations with Italian planning researcher and film maker Giovanni Attili, from the University of Rome (see Attili & Sandercock 2006), I have come to appreciate the incredibly rich potential of multimedia in manifesting an epistemology of multiplicity, as well as its potential (as a form of persuasive storytelling) for influencing policy and being used as a tool in community development. Attili's lead article in this Interface elaborates his own philosophy of ‘digital ethnography’ and its applications in planning. His 30-minute film about his neighbourhood in Rome (the Pigneto), chosen to be screened at the Mediterranean Film Festival in Rome in 2004, is an eloquent demonstration of this ethnographic application (and see www.mongrel-stories.com for a preview of our collaborative work).

Other planning practitioners are now experimenting with specific applications of video in planning processes. The Australian social planner Wendy Sarkissian has been as pioneering in this as she has been in so many other dimensions of planning practice (see Sarkissian, 2005), and here she writes about her evolving experimentation since 1990. Jon Frantz, a young Vancouver practitioner who has founded a planning consultancy that specializes in the uses of video in planning processes, here describes an experiment in participatory video. Finally, British planning scholar Mark Tewdwr Jones reflects on ways in which cinema can enrich a planner's understanding of place attachment and place-making.

Canadian planning scholar Penny Gurstein, who is also an architect and documentary film-maker, ruminates on these four contributions.

Digital Ethnographies in the Planning Field

Flatland

In 1882, Edwin Abbot wrote an imaginary novel about a bi-dimensional reality: Flatland. It is a completely level world, a vast sheet of paper in which houses, inhabitants and trees are straight lines, triangles, polygons and other geometric figures. Through a striking narrative, Abbott invented a place and filled it with entities characterized by abstract and linear contours. These figures move freely on a surface but without the power of rising above or sinking below it. In this reality nobody has the perception of a third dimension. The irruption of a Sphere in Flatland provokes bewilderment in the Square-Narrator who does not accept the existence of a world with another dimension. His reaction is violent: a three-dimensional world is not possible. It is a deceit. The Square tries to kill the Sphere. He wants to hand the Sphere over to justice. For its part the Sphere tries to convince the Square with an analogical reasoning, in vain. There is no solution for the Sphere but to kidnap the Square and carry it to a higher position, separated from Flatland from where it is possible to discern new shapes and dimensions.

An unspeakable horror seized me. There was a darkness; then a dizzy, sickening sensation of sight that was not like seeing. I saw a Line that was not a Line; Space that was not Space; I was myself and not myself. When I could find voice, I shrieked aloud in agony: ‘either this is madness or this is hell!’(Abbott, 1993, p. 124)

The coercive action of the Sphere destabilizes the self-referential vision of the Square, leading it to a diverse image of the world. A logical leap makes the Square transit from one world to another, from a consolidated perception to the comprehension of different cognitive laws. This leap is painful. The kidnapping is a methodological kidnapping: “only the violence and the giddiness can crash the unhealthy use of the language” (Manganelli, 1993, p. 165).

Abbott's novel tragically ends with the futile attempt by the Square to convince Flatland's other inhabitants about the existence of a third dimension. The Square is derided and imprisoned.

Prometheus up in Spaceland was bound for bringing down fire for mortals, but I—poor Flatland Prometheus—lie here in prison for bringing nothing to my countrymen. Yet I exist in the hope that these memoirs, in some manner, I know not how, may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimension, and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality. (Abbott, 1993, pp. 150–151)

Flatland's narrative illusionism ends with the sensation that other spaces are conceivable and with the conviction that each language faces a challenge when it accepts new possible descriptive codes: it is a tragic attack on the limitations of the language and on the spatial images that are created by it. It is the possibility of thinking about other potential dimensionalities that violates the consolidated ones.

GIOVANNI ATTILI

AddressGiovanniAttiliUniversity of Rome, La Sapienza, Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria, Via Eudossiana, 18 - 00184, Rome, Italy

University of Rome, La Sapienza, Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria, Rome, Italy

Digital Ethnographies in the Planning Field

Senseless Grammatical Examples

Why Flatland? There is an interesting analogy between the level world invented by Abbott and the representations of urban space that are traditionally produced in the urban planning field. In this field, a sort of cartographic anxiety ends up turning the city into a bi-dimensional surface that is crossed by lines, marked by geometries and filled with homogenous colours. These stylized grammars flatten urbanity into an isotropic and metrical space. As in Abott's novel, cartographies are overfilled with geometrical, detailed, descriptive and dimensionally limited languages. From above, a triumphant flying over technique photographs the physical shape of the city through zenithal views that are projected on scaled papery surfaces. The eyes are firmly kept on the ground, according to a logic that gives sense only to the figures that can express themselves in a readable shape and inside a visible and bi-dimensional surface. From this perspective the physical-material dimension of the territory is the only one to be legitimately considered and represented.

Through a rationalist and abstract operation, cartographies reduce urban complexities to morphologies, models, systems and compositions. The result is a flat territory that is inhabited by signs: “texts of an impersonal, inhuman and intelligible narrative; demented and horribly reasonable like impeccable and senseless grammatical examples” (Manganelli, 1993, p. 166). The city is sterilized and represented like a fictitious geometrical-Euclidean container: a conventional and timeless space, in which the objects can be tidily placed according to a system of pre-determined orthogonal axis. As a result, the urban space is frozen and vivisected through metric-quantitative lenses and panoptic-standardizing views. These representations embody a simplifying and control anxiety: from above, the city is controllable at a glance and can be translated into a Cartesian level where nothing seems to escape from the territorial government.

Nevertheless this kind of city appears surreal and improbable. In this city humanities, accidents, conflicts and relational spaces are scientifically removed. Like in Flatland, the cartographed city lacks other dimensions. This does not refer to the geometrical height that is symbolized by the irruption of the Sphere in the bi-dimensionality of Abbott's world. The missing dimensions of urban planning cartographies are connected with pluriverses of irreducible inhabitants characterized by relations, expectations, feelings, reminiscences, bodies, voices and stories which are stratified in living urbanities. In other words, cartographies are meticulously determined in representing the silenced shapes of an objectified city, but they forget life-through-space. They do not consider what is invisible, what loves hiding and elusively pulsates in the interstices of maps and of the morphological design of the city. Beyond what is already told and done. Beyond plans and cartographies.

It is urgent to invent new analytical tools that can give centrality to people. It is important to focus on the individual and collective signification practices through which inhabitants create their own living environment. It is important to find a dense way to read a relational space that connects different situated and embodied subjectivities. Doing this does not deny the relevance of the physical dimension of the city, rather it is evoking the need of an expressive and analytical path whose aim is to intersect the physical and the relational space. An alternative envisioning is evoked of spatiality as illustrated in the heterotopologies of Foucault, the trialectics and thirdings of Lefebvre, the marginality and radical openness of bell hooks, the hybridities of Homi Bhabha which directly challenge all conventional modes of spatial thinking: the demolition of all the flatlands which traditionally permeate our disciplinary field.

GIOVANNI ATTILI

AddressGiovanniAttiliUniversity of Rome, La Sapienza, Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria, Via Eudossiana, 18 - 00184, Rome, Italy

University of Rome, La Sapienza, Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria, Rome, Italy

Digital Ethnographies in the Planning Field

Ethnographies as Polyphonic and Evocative ‘Texts’

According to these premises, what kind of path should we take? First of all we should be conscious that the present internal organization of disciplines represents the result of an historical course. This course, in its evolution, has left aside many other unexplored and perhaps more fecund knowledge articulations, paradigms and approaches. From this perspective it is possible to think critically about some possibilities that have been historically set aside and try to make them up-to-date (Bourdieu, 1995). For example, the revaluation of qualitative analytical tools that historically permeated some 1950s' planning experiences (see Doglio & Mazzoleni, 1995; Olivetti, 1960; Lanzani, 1996). In the last decades, these qualitative analytical approaches have been progressively sacrificed in favour of more quantitative methods which have influenced many disciplinary sectors, even those which were far away from the hard scientific disciplines. But what is not recognized is that a powerful imaginary is taken as the best one, unless we accept that what's powerful is necessarily the best.

Rather than succumbing to the mermaid's singing of the quantitative analysis (made of numbers, universal laws, matrixes, zoning and objectifying maps), maybe it is time to embrace a more qualitative view of the city. Ethnographic analysis, for example, succeeds in expressing what is beyond the surface of maps, objects, classifications and quantitative-aggregated data. Such analysis intentionally focuses on individual lives that cross urbanities made of changing densities, memories, perceptive and aesthetic levels. It is an attentive and minute analysis of urban spaces, where existences, intersections, languages and interstitial freedoms delineate controversial and palpitating landscapes.

The goal of this kind of analysis is to deeply get in touch with inhabitants' life practices, conflicts and modalities of space appropriation/construction which reveal principles, rationalities and potential writings which transgress the ordered text of the planned city. Intercepting these multiform practices means to be able to listen to the city murmurs, to catch stories, to read signs and spatial poetics, all of which is sense generative. It means to research the invisible which is intended as something which is not imprisonable in any scheme or form, as something which ends up in interrogating our ways of exploring, analyzing, depicting and planning the space in which we live.

Transgressing the ideology of the transcendental observer, the ethnographic approach privileges the study of collaborative contexts that are aimed to produce a collective invention of interconnected stories. In this perspective there is no more one lonely eye that scans everything, but a multiplicity of situated views based on inhabitants stories that cannot be thought as separated monads, rather as connected and sense-making narratives. Through in-depth interviews and the confrontation of diverse visions of the world, the ethnographic approach becomes a powerful tool to be used for a deeper comprehension of what animates our cities: the diverse souls, the conflicts and the unexplored resources.

The result is a narrative that is built on the intersection of multiple narratives. It is a story which does not pretend to represent the truth, claiming subjectivity and partiality. In each story, before narrating the others, we narrate to ourselves and we narrate ourselves, disclosing invisible threads which hide a desire or its opposite: a fear. A plot connects the narrative elements: fate or mind cannot unravel kinked skeins and misleading perspectives where everything hides some other things.

The key phrase to comprehend the fulcrum of the ethnographic analysis is ‘to evoke’: it creates a plausible world taken from the everyday life, playing with fantastic pieces that combine themselves in transfigured images. Assuming this perspective, ethnography rids it self of the obsession of a mimesis that is rooted in objects, facts, generalization and truth. Rather, it becomes an inter-connected patchwork of evocative images that are imbued with ambiguity and indeterminateness. Their comprehension escapes the researcher intentionality, becoming a field that is open to diverse interpretation and possibilities. This level of interpretative openness transforms ethnographies into possible catalysts for interaction inside planning processes. In other words, they represent a different way of provoking dialogue, suggestions and inclusiveness in renewing decision-making contexts. It is a way of opening up a public conversation.

GIOVANNI ATTILI

AddressGiovanniAttiliUniversity of Rome, La Sapienza, Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria, Via Eudossiana, 18 - 00184, Rome, Italy

University of Rome, La Sapienza, Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria, Rome, Italy

Digital Ethnographies in the Planning Field

Multi-sensory Aesthetics in Digital Ethnographies

In order to be communicated and socialized, the analysis of the community ethos (‘ethno’) has to be translated into a writing (‘graphic’). This is not necessarily a restrictively verbal transcription, rather it can draw from a plurality of different languages. It can be interpreted as a hybrid ‘text’ that makes discourse forms problematic, melting and de-constructing acquired codes. In doing this, postmodern ethnography feeds on the potentialities of new forms of technologies (ICT). The current technological organization level cannot be thought of as an accidental or revocable phenomenon. It represents an influential paradigm that cannot be disregarded: “a new system of restraints and limits, but even of unpredictable and unprecedented possibilities, through which it is possible to undertake new paths of thought, action and behavior” (Gargani, 1999, p. 16).

New media have the disruptive and intrinsic capability of contextually using different expressive languages. They seem complex scores of multi-sensory idioms that can be creatively re-assembled to express and communicate specific contents. Potentially, new media have as many epistemologies and languages as you can find in the world itself (Levy, 1997). They represent an extremely versatile and dynamic container inside which it is possible to build complex ‘images’: forests of signs and communicative metaphors which are co-involved and inter-penetrated. The creative bricolage of media and diversified messages produce something more than the simple summation of these elements: it is a digital poetics that is germinative of new meanings.

Digital languages strengthen the expressive possibilities of ethnographies, connecting a qualitative study of the city to the potentialities of deeply communicative languages. Digital ethnographies expressively narrate stories, whose role is now widely recognized in the planning field (Eckstein & Throgmorton, 2003; Forester, 1989; Mandelbaum, 1991; Sandercock, 2003). In simple terms, they are able to communicate narratives through aesthetic involvements that are crucial in urban interactions. They can give expression to inspiring stories that are potentially able to trigger further planning processes, showing possibilities and sense worlds.

From this point of view, digital ethnographies are creative and very delicate inventions that reveal meaning without committing the mistake of defining it. They circumscribe, without closing or labelling, leaving imaginative spaces open. “Like a space which contains and opens at the same time, like a spoken word and like a sense intention that is never concluded” (Melucci, 2000, p. 112), digital ethnographies point at opacity, semantic fluidity, ambiguities that could give rise to different possible interpretations. All these characteristics are extremely important in awakening new imageries and in allowing people to creatively think about their own space, moving beyond maps, blueprints and schematics; moving beyond limited forms of interaction.

New technologies transform ethnographic analysis into a different communicative tool that offers a surplus of meanings and interpretations. It does not exhaust itself. It is not univocally determined. It never finds a precise answer. Each view finds another richness. It can be impregnated with what is not verifiable or inferable according to logic and scientific languages. This is an imprecise and arbitrary dimension that is not easy to grasp once and for all; the more you try to determine its essence, the more this essence withdraws, offering space for new interpretations.

Digital ethnographies embody the transition from rhetoric to poetics: it is a leap which allows the move from referential and argumentative languages to germinative and constructive ones. The potential result is the transfiguration of the world into a plot of ‘living metaphors’ (Ricoeur, Gargani, Davidson and Rotry), which plays a role in breaking acquired codes and in generating new grammars and meanings. It is not the outcome of aprioristic schemes. Rather it emerges poetically. The expressive and communicative characteristics of digital ethnographies create a space for the potential creation of fervent and pulsating metaphors: a creative filter which allows the cohabitation with what is inexpressible; a communicative act that is able to involve and connect people in a public discourse on the environments in which they live.

GIOVANNI ATTILI

AddressGiovanniAttiliUniversity of Rome, La Sapienza, Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria, Via Eudossiana, 18 - 00184, Rome, Italy

University of Rome, La Sapienza, Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria, Rome, Italy

Digital Ethnographies in the Planning Field

Interactive Astonishment

Like an artistic gesture, digital ethnographies succeed in arousing astonishment: an interrogation state that is suspended between light and shadow, between known things and invisible horizons.

The amazement in front of the unknown becomes the thought which enlarge the investigated field, From this perspective the astonishment leads to the infinite. The astonishment is the beginning of the knowledge and of the philosophical thought. It is intended as an emotion which follows something that cannot be totally and integrally taken. (Gargani, 1999, p. 22)

Paradoxically the pretension of an exhaustive and all-inclusive knowledge is what overwhelms what is investigated, preventing a deeper comprehension. This is the epistemological limit that characterizes the disciplinary specializations when they attempt to exhaustively control their specific object of interest. The disciplinary, formalized, and apparently thorough translation of reality ends up removing its ambiguity, its depth, the unthinkable. Astonishment awakens when we abandon the rational and comprehensive control and start exploring the world in questioning terms, putting objectivity into brackets.

Digital ethnographies embody a possible knowledge path that is made of imaginations, poetical gestures and aesthetic experiences. The astonishment theme, fundamental to a different cognitive approach, is particularly relevant because it is the presupposition for action. Through astonishment it is possible to reinvent the sense frameworks through which people organize their own experience of the world and in the world. Poetical and evocative digital ethnographies offer a space for suggestions and drifting imaginaries. These aesthetic and perceptive drifts are creative actions; they create a space for new possibilities. In opening this space, digital ethnographies represent a field in which acting becomes possible. Just as in the Veda, Vishnu, through his steps, creates a space for the warlike action of Indra (Dumezil, 1969, cit. in de Certeau, 1990, p. 185), so digital ethnographies prefigure possibilities of action, becoming an occasion that could create interactive contexts.

Digital ethnographies act like deforming mirrors that alter events or relations that are not recognizable in the ordinary flows of everyday life. These mirrors are not unidirectional, mechanical or positive. They do not passively photograph the reality. “They act as reflecting consciences and the reflected images are the product of them. These images are modeled in vocabulary and rules, in meta-linguistic grammars through which unprecedented performances can occur” (Turner, 1993, p. 76). In other words, digital ethnographies decline reality in a subjunctive mood, voicing supposition, desire, hypothesis or possibility. They can be interpreted as active agents of change: a drawing board where it is possible to use the colours that are able to stimulate a social interaction. This is a strongly involving interaction, one that recalls emotions, aesthetic-perceptive dimensions and whatever is familiar inside us. This is possible because digital ethnographies transgress technical and specialized languages, which are usually not very involving.

GIOVANNI ATTILI

AddressGiovanniAttiliUniversity of Rome, La Sapienza, Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria, Via Eudossiana, 18 - 00184, Rome, Italy

University of Rome, La Sapienza, Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria, Rome, Italy

Digital Ethnographies in the Planning Field

Performatory Occasions and Situational Planning

Out of their lives and interests, out of their skill areas, separated one from the other, individuals have nothing to say. The difficulty is to catch them—both in an emotional and topological sense—and to group them together, involving them in an adventure through which they could enjoy imagining, exploring, building together sensitive environments. (Levy, 1997, p. 131)

Digital ethnographies aim to reach this goal. They can be used as fulcra of strongly interactive events: these are performatory situations that are able to implicate diverse subjectivities, remembrances, fantasies and creativities. They are “life temporary environments of a superior passional quality” (Debord, 1957) to be molecularly disseminated in the city, in the wake of the situationist experimentations. In these events, digital ethnographies can be inserted in urban space through psycho-geographical projections on the faces of buildings, interactive installations, strongly involving digital games.

The ethnographic event becomes a magnet for interaction: “after the event there is a multiplication of the narrations that try to explain it, to exalt it, to find the moral from it, to forgive it, to abhor it, to repudiate it, to use it in order to characterize a collective experience and as a model for the future” (Turner, 1993, p. 93). The collective fruition of digital ethnographies in an urban space becomes a playful-constructive moment where propositions, creative listening, metaphors and symbolic acts interact. The construction of performatory occasions based on the use of digital ethnographies is the bet of reaching change, pushing the game and multiplying the touching moments (Debord, 1989). In this way the city could become a net of playful moments, a new theatre that could host cultural operations which are concretely and resolutely built through the collective organization of interactive environments. The astonishment and the interactive potential connected with the use of digital ethnographies allow city building processes to emerge. They are interactive occasions thought to collectively define future scenarios and to nourish endogenous and creative capabilities in order to produce changes in urban life.

From this point of view, digital ethnographies can be interpreted as ‘relational and communicative disposals’ that “help building social bonds through learning and knowledge exchange; communicative tools that are able to listen to, to combine and to give expression to diversity” (Levy, 1997, p. 133). These disposals invite people to suggest modifications, further narrations through a dynamic knowledge management to be explored “not only conversationally but even through sensitive modalities according to significant paths and associations” (Levy, 1997, p. 210). In the consciousness that reason does not produce the totality of our actions, to create real communicative space and induce people to act it is not enough to ‘tell’, rather it is necessary to transfer energies, make sentiments and emotions vibrate, awake latent aspirations, knowledge and energies, rediscovering the powerful role of artistic and poetic languages. It is necessary to focus on the cognitive and communicative performance of the aesthetic pleasure that is not intended as accessory rather as central moment of every communicative process (Gargani, 1999). These disposals are the foundations of a different idea of planning; a meeting occasion for the (possible) construction of common goods and not top-down politics that emerge from interaction. It is a form of planning that is deprived of its argumentative, categorical and controlling aura. It is the construction of processes rooted in the power of narrative exchange and constructions of endogenous territorial practices.

The assumption of this perspective means to abandon the idea of an intentional, comprehensive, state-controlled and panoptical planning in favour of the construction of strong interaction processes and of the ‘images’, disposals and situations which could potentially catalyze them.

This means to think about a propulsive planning that could be able to stimulate sense-making occasions, giving value to socially hidden or inactive potentialities, activating empowerment, multiplying different learning situations. This is about a less normative planning, that is more inclined to make needs, actions and politics emerge from inhabitants themselves.

The implications of this perspective are particularly important and can contribute to a cultural re-orientation of territorial politics which are oriented to multiply the occasions of social interaction. This approach is difficult: it requires more and not less intervention. Moreover it requires the public operators to have a deep comprehension of the phenomena, a less normative attitude, abandoning the standardization of social behaviors that is traditionally considered the best solution for their control. (Tosi, 2000, p. 1218)

The unforeseeable outcomes of the social interactions (produced locally and contextually) become the fulcrum of a different idea of planning. Assuming this perspective, the control anxiety of planning breaks down.

Given the crisis of the political representation and of state-controlled planning, it is urgent to creatively imagine other paths such as the multiplication of the collective learning occasions that can produce innovative change grammars. The use of digital ethnographies seems to answer this kind of exigency. They have the potentialities to catalyze people's interaction, socializing evocative and powerful stories-images of the city, involving inhabitants to creatively discuss the interconnected space dimensionalities in which they live. They are intended to prefigure possible changes. They can do this, by creating “sonorous buildings, cities of voices and songs, instantaneous, luminous and moving like flames” (Levy, 1997, p. 134).

GIOVANNI ATTILI

AddressGiovanniAttiliUniversity of Rome, La Sapienza, Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria, Via Eudossiana, 18 - 00184, Rome, Italy

University of Rome, La Sapienza, Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria, Rome, Italy

Video as a Tool in Community Engagement

First Attempts

Back in 1990, working as a social planning consultant in Melbourne, I had the perfect client with the perfect project that allowed my firm to explore the potential of video in community engagement. On a windswept site in suburban Melbourne called Timbarra in 1990, we designed and managed a workshop for new residents of a private housing development. The client was the Urban Land Authority (ULA), the State land developer in Victoria. The project manager was community artist, Graeme Dunstan.¹ We called our workshop ‘A Welcome Home’, a conscious play on words. This participatory design workshop was intended to assist people in making decisions about their house design and siting, in consultation with their neighbours and expert advisers. A complementary aim was to introduce them to local community services and facilities and to plant the seeds of the community development process for the new estate. We were welcoming people who had recently purchased a residential lot and we wanted them to feel at home, as they negotiated with their neighbours to make decisions about siting their houses on their lots.

New homebuyers attended the workshop, many of whom were moving from inner-city locations to experience what they saw as the benefits of urban living on the fringe. The workshop was very ambitious in its objectives. Our aim was to showcase local community services and facilities, to introduce the new residents to their immediate neighbours, to pilot test an innovative participatory design model, and to trial some innovative approaches to community engagement with children.

One of the features of the programme was the use of a professional video team (Lemac Film and Video, Melbourne) to produce a short edited videotape of the children's participatory activities to be shown to the adults at the conclusion of the half-day workshop. To achieve this, an editing suite was set up in the school's nurse's office and arrangements were made to videotape both the children's activities and the adults' workshop.

The adults' workshop was set up in a dramatic and eye-catching manner. From the ceiling of the Berwick Park Primary School gymnasium, we hung a peach-coloured marquee liner. This simple touch transformed the gymnasium into a soft womb-like space, which drew an immediate comment from participants as they entered the room. All participants, who had been interviewed by telephone before they arrived, were allocated to tables shared with their immediate neighbours. Mock street signs showed the location of each resident group. Welcoming them at each table was a trained facilitator and recorder, as well as a professional architect to assist with house-siting decisions.

Designed for the participatory design exercise and built at great expense by a model maker was a lamp that simulated the sunlight at the solstices and equinoxes, enabling participants to see movements of the sun on their house lots and even into their dwellings, represented by small timber models.

In the children's workshop, facilitated by Kelvin Walsh, two methods were used. In the face-painting exercise, the facilitator asked the children to describe features of their ideal neighbourhood and then painted the child's face with a representation of these qualities. For example, one child who especially appreciated ‘wildness’ received a wild animal face and long paper claws on his fingers. A tape recorder at the facilitator's elbow recorded children's responses to pre-determined questions, as did the video crew. The second children's exercise was the food model, where Timbarra children designed their ideal community and neighbourhoods using food. Video cameras captured huge smiles and microphones captured squeals of delight as ‘taboo’ materials like liquorice and Smarties were used in the collaborative design process.

The response of the adults to the 2-minute video of the children's work was both surprise and appreciation. The video revealed a great deal of wisdom in the children's recommendations, However, in common with many adults with whom we have worked, the Timbarra residents appeared surprised by their children's ideas.

What I learned from this inaugural experience was that there is no substitute for video in capturing squeals of delight, a toe-tapping bush band, the energy of children working collaboratively, and the industrious focus of their parents working in a hands-on way to site their houses on their lots. The act of producing a professional video in one week to meet a competition deadline convinced me of what was possible with professional assistance. The visceral quality of our video captured impromptu interviews, with one man whose house was poorly sited by his builder, candidly admitting, “We never planned the sunlight”. The tone of voice of participants and facilitators reporting back to the whole group reflected both enthusiasm and exasperation, as some participants, like my interviewee, had bought house-and-land packages, only to realize that their houses were sited inappropriately to achieve solar passive benefits.1

Humour is one of the qualities that video captures that photographs cannot. We designed an elaborate role-play training session for all the ‘Welcome Home’ workers, who played the roles of invited participants. A somewhat nervous crew collapsed in howls of laughter when the expensive prototype of the solar lamp fell apart in the hands of Kevin Taylor, the landscape architect who was demonstrating it. As John Forester sagely notes:

Humor can give us the gift, even if momentarily, of recognizing that something links and connects us as adversaries in the room. We now see something that we mutually share: a need to learn to understand the situation in which we actually find ourselves interdependently connected and that gift of humor then can contribute in a small but perhaps still important way to creating a ‘we’ of nevertheless distrusting and skeptical parties … (Forester, 2004, p. 223).

We also learned that video was a way of showing embodiment. Only with video were we able to demonstrate exactly how participatory design exercises worked and to refine our approaches. We found that after a few minutes, despite intrusive cameras, microphones and hot lights, both adults and children ignored the video crew. These were the days before privacy legislation and signed permissions were required, but even today we find that video is not as intrusive as some might expect.

WENDY SARKISSIAN

AddressWendySarkissianSchool of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada, [email protected]

School of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada

Video as a Tool in Community Engagement

Further Experimentation

Since 1990, we have been experimenting with the use of video, always in parallel with still photography. In a participatory design exercise in South Australia in late 1990, we repeated the use of a role-play video to train facilitators and recorders (and to explain to the funding municipality how we were spending their money). Again, we encountered moments of group hilarity as I played a truculent child who interrupted the adults' process. Our videotape session allowed us to fine-tune the model, even though this was the first time we had used it.

In an ambitious project in Melbourne, also in 1990, community artist Graeme Dunstan pushed a co-operative client (the Victorian Roads Authority, VicRoads) almost to the edge with a wild workshop called ‘The Gods Must be Crazy’. In a role-play scenario inserted into a day-long stakeholders' workshop, the gods of Melbourne arterial roads were convened by the supremo, Zeus, assisted by two major gods: Gaia (mother of all life on Earth) and the God of Ageing Road Infrastructure, Arteriosclerosis. A highly ineffectual Hermes attempted to negotiate the conflicting needs of Melbourne's arterial road users with little success, as he was yelled at by a gang of unco-operative and territorial minor gods.

These truculent characters, played by some of Melbourne's prominent planners, included a particularly argumentative and domineering Taxidermus (God of Taxis), Bicyclops (God of Bicyclists), Pantechnicon (God of Truckies), a rational and unbending Statuometheos (God of Statutory Planning), Roadeometheos (God of Road Planning), Bureaucratus (God of Economic Rationalism) and other minor gods. A burly police officer embodied a fierce and demanding Hestia (Goddess of Children and the Hearth).

The video revealed the strong conflicts between representatives of arterial road user groups and the humour generated by this archetypal role-play took our respectful gesture toward the work of Gregory Bateson (1979) and Jean Houston (1982, 1987) to another level.

In another project, Kevin Taylor and I used video to record proposed changes to the foyer of the State Library of South Australia, using 100 per cent mock-up techniques and a highly structured role play to test the effectiveness of the changes for different user groups. The video crew captured library staff and team members preparing props to transform the library foyer according to the new design, as well as props needed to test the simulated environment. Large cardboard suitcases and paper bouquets of flowers and shopping bags were constructed to assist staff playing the roles of encumbered shoppers whose packages placed a huge strain on library storage resources. The video captured bodies in conflict, blocked sightlines from the reception desk to the Reference Department, and severe congestion caused by conflicting library trolleys, wheelchair users and encumbered shoppers. Combined with a very systematic scoring system whereby staff assessed the mocked-up foyer's suitability for different user groups, the video provided a clear example of changes necessary to support the predicted uses. Again, the video captured humorous interchanges.

In another project managed by Graeme Dunstan, a professional videographer, Abraham Zuniga, was hired to document a 3-month community cultural development project at Eagleby on Queensland's Gold Coast. This project is described in an interview with John Forester reported in 2005 (see Sarkissian, 2005). This complex project, entitled ‘Stories in a Park’, saw Abraham training Year 10 high school students in the use of video for interviewing their neighbours about park planning and design. ‘Stories in a Park’ had many dramatic components, including the construction and ultimate burning of a huge cardboard sculpture representing what local people saw as the stigma of Eagleby: an eagle grounded from flying by the force of other people's negative perceptions. Captured on Abraham's video was the chanting of a crowd of 3000 local people as flames engulfed the stigma: “Burn the stigma! Burn the stigma!” Only the videotaped record was able to convey that powerful moment when something lifted, something changed forever in Eagleby.

Abraham Zuniga videotaped the team development workshop in 2001 for Melbourne's Urban and Regional Land Authority.2 Here, in an exercise in “giving voice to nonhuman Nature”, a team of planning and development consultants constructed a beautiful representation of non-human Nature to participate as a member of their team for the next 10 years as they planned a suburban housing development for 25 000 residents. The video documented the design and construction of the Nonhuman Being and the self-conscious but touching ceremony designed to welcome the Being into the team. It revealed participants' unabashed enthusiasm and their unquestioning commitment to incorporating principles of environmental ethics and sustainability into the planning process.

WENDY SARKISSIAN

AddressWendySarkissianSchool of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada, [email protected]

School of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada

Video as a Tool in Community Engagement

Final Reflections: Why Use Video in Community Engagement?

This brief review of the use of video in my practice over the past 15 years reminds me of the value of immediate and authentic feedback which video can provide in community engagement contexts. It is an invaluable tool in showing spaces and places and people moving around in them. Because participants in community workshops and role-play exercises quickly come to ignore the camera, microphone and even the lights, video communicates a sense of verisimilitude that cannot be conveyed by any other medium. For practitioners, video communicates a felt sense of the experience, which we cannot otherwise communicate. It is great for communicating off-the-cuff and impromptu interviews and for demonstrating exactly how to set up an activity and how the process looks when it is happening. Diversity, congestion, conflicts and spatial relations are all easier to see than they are in still photographs.

One of the great values of video is its repeatability: a video of a process can be shown repeatedly as an instructive tool. One does not have to keep repeating the process and reconstructing similar events, thank heavens, because we have found that ‘perfect clients’ (cashed up and open to innovation) are few and far between. Our humble homemade training video, Listening to All the Voices, now out of print, contained clips of some of our innovative projects. It had a loyal following among students and teachers of planning and design (Sarkissian et al. , 1994).

For those of us who sometimes find ourselves working at the edge, video reminds us of what was possible and brings us back to the laughter of the moment. We remember what worked and what did not work. And we can see why.

Importantly, video helps us remember what really happened. So when the display villages manager reports to his boss that the role-play simulation in which he played a kookaburra was “a waste of time”, we review the video of the 1990 Conference of the Birds segment in a workshop on market segmentation in Melbourne's housing market. We see him wearing an elegant mask, enthusiastically embodying a laughing kookaburra and demanding (in a shrill kookaburra's voice) that builders acknowledge his family's unique nesting needs.

What other evidence would we need?

WENDY SARKISSIAN

AddressWendySarkissianSchool of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada, [email protected]

School of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada

Using Participatory Video to Enrich Planning Process

Introduction

With the infusion of communication technology that permeates today's society planners have the ability to embrace alternative means of public engagement. In doing so, there is potential to enrich their practice by welcoming creative forms of expression, accepting alternative ways of knowing, and more accurately depicting the visual and emotional context in which we work. One under-explored tool for public engagement is participatory video (PV). This article reflects on my recent involvement with a PV project, highlighting the dualism that exists within such a process. I conclude by offering some practical considerations for planners interested in using PV.

JONATHAN FRANTZ

AddressJonathanFrantz208–131 Water Street, Vancouver, V6B 4M3, BC, Canada, [email protected]

Vancouver BC, Canada

Using Participatory Video to Enrich Planning Process

Planning through Storytelling

In presentations on PV I often find myself referring to James Throgmorton, and his notion that planning is a form of persuasive story telling (1996). Throgmorton sees planners as future oriented storytellers who write constitutive texts, which enter a dynamic social setting, often to be interpreted in many conflicting ways. If it is the goal of planners to support the poor and powerless, to promote nurturing values that appreciate the collective good, and to accommodate diversity, then we need mechanisms to broadcast this voice. In Throgmorton's competitive concept of planning, being an effective storyteller is a necessity.

In her recent book, Cosmopolis II, Leonie Sandercock provides compelling arguments that describe how stories and storytelling have successfully been used in planning processes; as foundation, origin and identity, and as catalyst for change, as well as in policy work and in pedagogy (2003). Sandercock's message is clear: storytelling should be more prominent in planning education; embracing and understanding storytelling will help planners produce more persuasive plans; and adopting storytelling into mainstream planning process could expand democratic discourse.

The research that I conducted is very much an attempt to respond to Sandercock's call for planners to embrace storytelling in practice and education.

JONATHAN FRANTZ

AddressJonathanFrantz208–131 Water Street, Vancouver, V6B 4M3, BC, Canada, [email protected]

Vancouver BC, Canada

Using Participatory Video to Enrich Planning Process

What is Participatory Video?

I begin with an introduction to the basic concept of PV through a brief overview of what is commonly referred to as the genre's precursor—the Fogo Process, developed in Canada in the 1970s. The Fogo Process was part of a 1970s initiative called Challenge for Change, which created a series of “films that intended to raise public consciousness about the rights and needs of disenfranchised and disadvantaged groups” (Wiesner, 1992, p. 68). Challenge for Change was not about producing progressive films about social issues but about using the process of production as a form of social change. This was achieved by using film production and distribution as means of empowering politically and socially disenfranchised people (Wiesner, 1992).

In the late 1960s Fogo Island (located off the east coast of Newfoundland) was struggling; as a community of 5000 they were facing the collapse of their local fishing economy (leaving 60 per cent of the population on social assistance), public infrastructure was in a state of disrepair, as many as 50 per cent of the islanders were functionally illiterate, and differences in religion and tradition socially divided the community. To address the problems facing Fogo Island the government at the time proposed to relocate the entire community to a nearby ‘development town’ (Henaut, 1991).

Colin Low, a film-maker, and Don Snowdon, an academic, developed the idea to use video as a mechanism to facilitate dialogue between Fogo Island residents and government officials. In doing so they developed a revolutionary film-making process centred on some key community based concepts. They required each subject to have full editorial rights over their appearance, and every effort was made to ensure that the government would respond to the community-produced video.

There was no formal evaluation of the Fogo project, so it is difficult to come to a conclusive understanding of how successful the Fogo films were as a community development tool, but shortly after the films were produced a fishing co-operative and a central school were established on Fogo Island. One important note of reflection on the Fogo project came from Tony Williams of Memorial University who stated that it would be inappropriate to assign a linear relationship between the films and the subsequent action and development that occurred on Fogo (Williams, 1988). Were it not for the sustained efforts of the university and the government the films in isolation would have likely resulted in a temporary moment of excitement at best.

The Fogo Process and the ensuing research that followed, paved the way for the research that I have conducted. The following statement by Wiesner (1992) is particularly inspirational:

Although much has been written about the empowerment of local communities through media, little is known about the effectiveness of locally produced film and video in promoting social change in urban areas. In all likelihood, other less expensive and easier-to-produce media—particularly newsletters—have played a much larger role in community development than film or video. The question is whether projects like Fogo could work in urban areas if properly designed, and if so, to what end? (p. 71)

With inspiration from the Fogo Process, I explored how a PV framework could be used in an urban context. The following discussion describes the project that I collaboratively co-ordinated and implemented.

JONATHAN FRANTZ

AddressJonathanFrantz208–131 Water Street, Vancouver, V6B 4M3, BC, Canada, [email protected]

Vancouver BC, Canada

Using Participatory Video to Enrich Planning Process

The Carrall Street Participatory Video Case

The Carrall Street Greenway PV project in Vancouver was conducted as a pilot project to explore the application of PV as a planning tool. In this project, three teams consisting of street-involved youth with limited access to resources, and graduate planning students produced a series of short videos that conveyed their collective perceptions and ideas on the design and installation of a proposed urban greenway in the City's most disadvantaged neighbourhood. I acted as the project co-ordinator, working collaboratively with partnering organizations consisting of video and urban planning professionals to develop the project framework, secure funding, and implement the project. Through the video-making process, team members gained the skills required to produce a series of videos that depicted their shared insight on the proposed greenway and the associated concepts of downtown revitalization.

The Carrall Street Greenway project, which was the focal topic for the PV, is considered:

a major revitalization and community building initiative put forth by the City of Vancouver… It is also a strategic initiative intended to focus public realm improvements and private investment along the Carrall Street corridor which will attract visitors to the area and stimulate business activities while providing improved neighbourhood areas and employment opportunities for Downtown Eastside residents. (Kudzius & Chen-Adams, 2006, p. 11)

Our video project was launched in April 2006. After an initial meeting, where the project concept and framework was reviewed, the participants were taught the skills needed for the video production, introduced to the basic planning concepts and informed about the details of the Carrall Street Greenway project.

When the background knowledge was in place and the skill development complete the participants were engaged in an intensive production period lasting three months. Once three general concepts emerged, through a series of brainstorming sessions, the participants self-selected into three working groups and began to prepare for production using standard film industry process. Where the production differed was in its iterative sessions of review and discussion and attempts to incorporate ideas of the wider community into their video pieces (which occurred with varying degrees of success). The final videos were completed in June 2006, then screened, presented and discussed at various events, like the World Planning Congress, and at community venues. Each of the three PVs differs significantly in style and content, although as a package they complement each other.

Overall the project was successful, in that the videos have spurred a series of lively discussions, provided a case study as the basis for a number of academic studies, imparted youth and students with video-making skills, and stimulated further research into the role that participatory video has in planning. Unlike the Fogo Process there was no intention to elicit a specific response from any level of government, as the greenway plans were close to finalized before we started. The impact of these videos is thus more likely to occur indirectly, through individual empowerment and learning, and future discussions and research.

JONATHAN FRANTZ

AddressJonathanFrantz208–131 Water Street, Vancouver, V6B 4M3, BC, Canada, [email protected]

Vancouver BC, Canada

Using Participatory Video to Enrich Planning Process

How can Participatory Video be Applied in Planning?

Throughout the Carrall Street project screenings, presentations and discussions people continually asked the question, what possible ways could PV be applied in planning? For the purposes of this article I am going to shed some light on the dualism that exists within the PV process, and conclude by offering some practical considerations for planners interested in using it.

PV is heralded as a process that can give voice to the voiceless, and empower disenfranchised citizens. In this context, PV has the potential to be used by radical planners to bring about social transformation. But PV is also able to engage marginalized citizens in planning processes, collect rich qualitative data and inform policy decisions. In this context, PV is appealing to the conventional planner interested in societal guidance. As Friedmann notes, if a planner attempts to engage in both societal guidance and social transformation the two are necessarily in conflict: “it is a conflict between the interests of a bureaucratic state and the interest of the political community” (1987, p. 38).

Where then does this leave a planner working with PV? Well, in a potentially sticky situation if they are not careful. With characteristics that can apply to both mainstream and radical planning, it is easy to slide into this conflict between the bureaucratic state and the political community that Friedmann refers to (1987). To avoid this dilemma, planners using PV need to be mindful of their approach to planning and proactively determine for whom they are working: the bureaucratic state or the political community. While Friedmann does refer to a spectrum that could, in theory, allow a planner to walk a fine line between functioning as a radical and a conventional planner, it is a very thin line when using PV. To the radical planner, the PV framework that suits them is one that provides participants with the technical ability to capture their uncensored voice in a medium that has the ability to reach a wide audience. The threat to the bureaucratic state, here, is the lack of control over how that power is used. To the conventional planner, PV is a way to inform decision making and policy with a rich source of qualitative data that, if used properly, can help build better relations between the community and the state.

Having tried to walk that fine line, and appeal to both the radical and mainstream side of planning, I would encourage planners interested in attempting this balancing act, to stay firmly grounded on one side or the other.

With the Fogo Process it was very clear that the purpose of the PV project was serving the needs of societal guidance by communicating community needs to government officials, and the government in turn responding through video to the community. This was one of the primary project goals of the Fogo Process and consequently the process was designed accordingly. With the Carrall Street video project, there was an expressed interest in having some impact at the bureaucratic level, but a choice was made (by the project managers) not to enter into an agreement with government representatives, to be freer to explore multiple aspects of PV. The point here is that PV can be designed to serve both the needs of conventional or radical planning paradigms, but the framework must be designed with specific intent.

JONATHAN FRANTZ

AddressJonathanFrantz208–131 Water Street, Vancouver, V6B 4M3, BC, Canada, [email protected]

Vancouver BC, Canada

Using Participatory Video to Enrich Planning Process

Conclusions

Planners are seemingly caught in a continual struggle between the desire to be expansive (in order to value detail) and the practical need to be reductionist (in order to make a decision). In this struggle, PV could be seen as an ideal addition to a planner's array of tools, as it has the ability, through visual, audio and text representation to provide rich descriptions that have been processed through a series of iterative reviews and refinement that culminates in a poignant story. By accepting a broad interpretation of what constitutes data, the ability for PV to significantly impact planning and decision-making processes is limited only by the creative application of the process.

What about the omnipresent limitations of time and money? The Carrall Street project cost $170 000 and required approximately 3000 hours of participant time (300 hours for each of the 10 participants). From a practical point of view these factors are problematic, but only if starting from a narrow definition of what acceptable deliverables are and if there is not a particularly dedicated participant group. If it is considered that the only measurable output is the videos themselves, it becomes challenging to justify the cost and time required to produce three, 5-minute videos. But by taking a broader definition and include the learning and skill development, capacity building, empowerment, relationship building, and artistic self-expression, the cost-benefit outcome may become more palatable. These terms used to justify the cost and time incurred suggest values associated with radical planning. So where does that leave conventional planners who are interested in participatory video?

Unless they have access to large amounts of money, and a very willing participant group, conventional planners will probably need to use an adapted version of the PV process. There are a few options that reduce the scope and scale of participation in the video production. While this may keep some of the desired benefits of PV, it should be noted that this becomes a distinctly different process from those commonly associated with PV.

One option is a collaborative video-making process where the participants are involved heavily with the story development, but less so in the technical components of the production process. Working with this type of video production framework reflects the reality that most people are not willing to dedicate the hours needed to become skilled in video production. Another option is to follow a design charrette concept where individuals are brought together to work intensively over a short period of time (2–5 days) and are given a very specific scope to work with—and given some type of production brief prior to the event. In this model, production teams would work closely with a skilled video facilitator who would walk them through creative brainstorming sessions, help them shape the story and then assist them with the video production. As with a traditional design charrette, the facilitator could take the rough product completed by the participants and clean it up before the final release.

These are just two options, but if PV is viewed along a spectrum of public engagement and personal development there are a number of possible ways the framework could be designed. PV is a malleable process that can be used to fit the needs of a number of practical realities and desired outcomes.

JONATHAN FRANTZ

AddressJonathanFrantz208–131 Water Street, Vancouver, V6B 4M3, BC, Canada, [email protected]

Vancouver BC, Canada

Film, Space and Place Identity: Reflections on Urban Planning

Introduction

The spatial turn in the social sciences has been a growing phenomenon in recent years. Awareness of space as an organizing category, and of the usefulness of spatialization in the social and cultural theory in modern and postmodern times, has influenced a number of authors over the last 25 years, including Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Edward Soja and Mike Davis. The spatial turn in the social sciences has assisted us in understanding “how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology” (Soja, 1989, p. 7). This understanding has also assisted us in interpreting the concept of space within particular cultures and geographies, and one of the most ideal formats through which this understanding can be developed is cinema.

It is appropriate that, as planners, we dip into culture and filmic representation and become familiar with these real and imagined place perceptions, since the perceptions of places often are translated into strong public emotions about places. These perceptions provide clues about the unique features that people regard as ‘good’ places to be, what they feel passionate about in our built environment, and in turn whether professional planning is assisting in shaping similar or completely contrary landscapes.

The argument in this article is that cinema is well positioned to provide an holistic interpretation of materially substantial interventions in the urban. The eclecticism of planning—associated with a growing body of theory on place identity, on placeness and placelessness, on the interrelated linkages between place, space, people and politics, with a long-standing interest in urban form and city life; and with an understanding of the use of urban space and arrangement—provides an opportunity for an alternative critical perspective, gleaned from celluloid representation, that might explain the prevalence and significance of people's perceptions of places that, often, as planners we feel remote from or unable to discern.

When considering perceptions of the urban, how it is planned and designed, how it has evolved historically, we have to acknowledge that a considerable amount of the best work has been undertaken in other disciplines to planning. The article here is making a call for planners to take a fuller interest in place image and representation, through three main bodies of work: (1) the literature on cultural geography which opens up a number of perspectives on place identity and place emotion; (2) the relationship between the ‘city’ as an identifiable place with its own identities, histories, myths and collective place narratives; (3) a discussion of the real and imagined worlds associated with place, or what Donald McNeill has referred to as “the plasticity and multidimensionality of the urban experience” (McNeill, 2005, p. 43). Film may be viewed as a technique or tool within each of these bodies of work that can assist planning in re-interpreting places and understanding emotional attachment to place.

Much of the work that I have been studying over the last few years hails from outside planning, including history, urban studies, film studies, and, of course, geography. Many of these fields have strong inter-disciplinary relationships to planning and I contend that further attempts to bring together these parallel paradigms could enrich planning writing by a greater sensitivity to this literature. Sandercock (2003) has been one of the few academic planners recently who has identified a need for this greater sensitivity:

In the postwar rush to turn planning into an applied science much was ignored – the city of memory, of desire, of spirit; the importance of place and the art of place-making; the local knowledges written into stones and memories of communities. (Sandercock, 2003, pp. 2–3)

MARK TEWDWR-JONES

AddressMarkTewdwr‐JonesBartlett School of Planning, University College London, London, UK, [email protected]

Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, London

Film, Space and Place Identity: Reflections on Urban Planning

Space, Cinema and the City

Shiel (2001) states that cinema is the ideal means through which to understand increasing spatialization organized both culturally and territorially, since it deals with the organization of space. This entails analysis of how space is treated, interpreted and portrayed in film and how film is treated in space through the shaping of human spaces. Geographers, and more recently planners, have also not only been concerned with space, but with place too. As Castells (1989) and Massey (2005) have described, cultural geographers have started to take an interest in the threatened status of place whether that is at national, regional, city, town or street levels. This relates to the increasing globalization of space by multinational corporations, the transfer of similar developments and production across continents, places, cultures and boundaries with little regard for indigenous place, and the inability of places to resist globalization. Space has fluidity and multiple meanings that can often go unrecognized or unquestioned. As Massey (2005, p. 89) suggests, “If space is genuinely the sphere of multiplicity, if it is a realm of multiple trajectories, then there will be multiplicities too of imaginations, theorizations, understandings, meanings”.

The interest of this article is how we may utilize film to depict the multiple meanings of places, and how the city represents the difference and distinctiveness for people, places and various territorial cultures. The contention is that the public often possesses attitudes towards notions of difference and distinctiveness, particularly when forces of globalization appears to create uniformity in the streetscape (the repetition of the same chain stores and coffee shops, for example, city to city), as they cling on to real or imagined perceptions about the stories, memories, traditions and cultures of individual places. Cinema can be a useful medium through which to record and represent these distinctive places and to locate and position narratives within built environments.

Film often provides a unique sense of place that is unavailable to other media. Film can be highly personal. Film observes, captures emotion, personality, motivation, reactions and conflicts, and allows these emotions and experiences to be translated to an observer in a more immediate and personal way, providing more focus on events and providing closer insights into events. Film can also capture changing environments over time and changing human behaviour, and allows time for the viewer to analyse and interpret. It can often communicate a visual presence, impact and development in an immediate way, and can be used subjectively to illustrate place. We may consider the use of how evocative filming of physical places deepens audiences' impressions of the subjective experience, while providing a good spatial sense of environmental change and development, by allowing reflection and a perspective on the interpretation and representation of places.

MARK TEWDWR-JONES

AddressMarkTewdwr‐JonesBartlett School of Planning, University College London, London, UK, [email protected]

Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, London

Film, Space and Place Identity: Reflections on Urban Planning

Legacies for Planning: Depicting the Urban Wasteland

The use of urban landscapes for the setting of films takes varied forms and Nowell-Smith (2001) has identified two typologies of cinematic urban landscapes. These comprise: first, there are the studio urban landscapes, possibly employing special effects and popular with film noirs, that serve to represent everything that is dark and dangerous about city living (for example, Fritz Lang's M, Ridley Scott's more futuristic Blade Runner); second, there are the location urban landscapes, popular in Britain in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s where places are recognizable either by setting and/or by name (the Boutling Brothers' Brighton Rock, and Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey, both of which represent quite clearly Brighton on the south England coast and Salford, Manchester, respectively). However, this typology is a little simplistic, since it is possible to additionally think of the use of specific places to falsely represent other geographies (the use of parts of London to represent Gotham City in the Tim Burton's Batman films), and the use of specific places to represent more anonymous urban industrial or post-industrial landscapes that are symbiotic of wider socio-political issues (see, for example, Room at the Top, and Mike Leigh's use of London as the setting for Naked).

The films depicting urban decay are of particular interest here for planners, principally because of the way they crystallize audience views about cities, planners' attempts to regenerate urban cores, and of urban change (Hill, 1986). Usually seen as representing social realism and some sort of urban wasteland, Mason (2001) has suggested that films set on locations within these industrial urban spaces are noted for their sparse anonymity, the evidence of capital, busy thoroughfares, and familiar architectural landmarks. In a British context, especially since the early 1960s, it often materializes through monochrome depictions of the rooftops of terraced housing, of cobbled streets, of children playing in the street, of factory chimneys, and wet paving stones (Lovell, 1990). Mason (2001), following Hill (1986), describes this particular strand of narrative as ‘British social realism’, since they possess structural similarities, and casual links between economics, environment and social behaviour. Hill (1986) asserts that:

… the ideas and attitudes expressed by the social problem film and the films of the British ‘new-wave’ do not derive simply from the focus of their subject matter but also from the deployment of certain types of conventions (in accordance with what an audience ‘accustomed’ to the cinema expects) which, then, inevitably structure and constrain the way in which that subject-matter can be presented in the first place. (p. 54)

Mason (2001) contends that the urban landscapes form part of the narrative text to these films since they serve to represent and promote a discourse on particular social conditions of urban existence that appear to be unified. This (selective) construction of the city in turn leads to discourses concerning the lives and portrayal of personal identities and inter-personal communication between family, friends, work colleagues and fellow urban habitants, and the social relations between them. As Mason (2001) states:

Through the selective use of locational and temporal zones in the film, emphasis is placed on the isolation and alienation of characters central to the narrative and, through this, typical themes concerning community and economics that may form a generic base for social realist narratives are given a particular postmodern inflection. (p. 245)

Although the social realism movement originated in the post-war era, the use of the urban wasteland and of failed intervention in filmic narrative remains a particularly favoured genre for film-makers. Against this construction and perception, planning as a form of social intervention continues to face several problems. The first concerns the use of locations to represent transitional zones for the characters, between the public area and the private area, and what actions and language may be appropriate for one but not the other. The other concerns the loyalties and identities of the central characters to particular communities. Associated with the latter, characters displaying this sense of loyalty within films frequently employ class distinction, social status concerns, and relative economic prosperity (or the lack of it) to illustrate graphically the inherent tensions that may exist, possibly within themselves, about their physical, economic or geographical positions, thereby heightening a sense of alienation with their environment. Higson (2000) suggests that such features within the British social realism cinema characterize a shift in representation in the last half of the 20th century in British cinema generally between images of homogeneity to images of heterogeneity. The ‘kitchen sink’ dramas of the late 1950s and early 1960s are to be seen, for Higson, as the response to inevitable change and the emergence of new socio-cultural and sub-cultural communities organized around ethnic challenges or youth styles and a response to changing local circumstances, with an inherent anti-change sentiment running through film narratives. Film then may encapsulate communities attempting to cope with physical change and with difference and diversity within the urban realm, sometimes negatively, sometimes positively, and to portray aspects of city life that remain prevalent today.

MARK TEWDWR-JONES

AddressMarkTewdwr‐JonesBartlett School of Planning, University College London, London, UK, [email protected]

Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, London

Film, Space and Place Identity: Reflections on Urban Planning

Conclusions

A deeper reading of cinematic representations not only assists in our reading of the urban, but also assists in how observers and professionals might learn and understand how particular people and communities possess attachments to particular urban landscapes. The problem is that the meaning of places, and how planners should take into account notions of place in ‘place-shaping’, are rather nebulous concepts. Place is and should be distinctive; it is difficult to pin down and planners have often been accused over decades of ignoring the unique features of places.

However, it is known that the public attach a great deal to emotion to notions of place. Some of these emotions are erroneous, whereas some are genuine forms of affection. What we mean when we talk and think about place matters a great deal, and how those perceptions of places have been coloured by cultural or historical experiences needs to be considered. The difficulty for planners is how to embrace these notions of culture and place meaning within harder decisions concerning development and strategy. There is also a further problem over the extent to which planners should extol the existing cultural attributes of a place or should impose new cultural meanings within places.

How we, as planners, perceive of a place and what, in turn, people try to cling on to in their perceptions of a place (or space), are issues that need to be integrated within the complex and often murky world of planning. This paper has argued that film can help planners to become more sensitive to notions of place and meaning, and how places are (mis)represented, and that this is useful if planning is going to perform a key role in creating the distinctive places of the future that the public and investors find appealing.

MARK TEWDWR-JONES

AddressMarkTewdwr‐JonesBartlett School of Planning, University College London, London, UK, [email protected]

Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, London

Multimedia and Planning: Commentary

All he believes are his eyes

And his eyes, they just tell him lies.

(Bob Dylan, ‘License to Kill’, Infidels. (Sony Music, 1983)

What we see (or do not see) is framed by the values and beliefs of our positionality—our socio-economic status, gender, race, culture, religion. It is more than just ‘seeing what we want to see’. The act of ‘seeing’ is filtered through the lens of our social construction. The planning profession has long been criticized for its disconcerting tendency to ‘purify’ our landscapes by imposing a uniformity to our social and physical environments in the belief that all citizens of a community see and interpret their communities as planners do. Challenging this notion, communicative planning has sought to understand how information becomes embedded in our practices and institutions (Innes, 1995). Forester (1999) and others have suggested that it is only through dialogue that a shared sense of a community can be created. For a planner, whose role is to facilitate the shaping of communities, planning methodologies that make knowledge and values explicit and communicable in a language that can be shared by diverse stakeholders, and tools that aid in the understanding of multiple points of view are critical. Multimedia could be one of those methodologies as it provides another point of entry into understanding complex planning issues. The four contributions to this Interface build on each other's contributions by framing present and future possibilities for multimedia within planning processes.

Digital Ethnographies as Interconnected Narratives:

Attili's case for digital ethnography as a data gathering, analytical and interpretive tool reads like a manifesto for the ‘expressive possibilities’ of ethnographies in producing a collective vision of ‘interconnected stories’ in ‘which acting becomes possible’. His approach opens us up to the poetic experiences of the everyday and how documenting those experiences can lead to transformations in individuals and the collective. While the power of video to tell personal stories is exploding (see YouTube.com) Attili reminds us that the act of recording does not necessarily result in profound revelations but it is the through the layering of multiple stories onto the grid of everyday landscapes that insights can evolve.

PENNY GURSTEIN

AddressPennyGursteSchool of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada, [email protected]

School of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada

Video for Community Engagement:

While Attili sets the stage for our immersion in a new profound way of creating planning stories, Sarkissian documents how video can be used in planning practice as a community engagement and participatory method. She describes the ‘visceral quality’ of the use of video to capture candid moments, spontaneous outbursts, and subtle socio-spatial relations. To her it is one of the many innovative tools (including role playing and simulation) that she uses as a participatory planner.

PENNY GURSTEIN

AddressPennyGursteSchool of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada, [email protected]

School of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada

Participatory Video for Social Change:

Finally, building upon the pioneering work done on participatory video (PV) by the National Film Board in the 1970s, Frantz aims to use video as a tool that could empower marginalized people by furthering social change through facilitating dialogue between diverse stakeholders. He is advocating going beyond the ethnographic work produced through digital ethnography and cinema interpretation, and for video to become more than a community engagement tool by becoming a change agent. This aim, acknowledged by Frantz, can become highly problematic if the process is not transparent. He describes a process in which he was engaged that had some elements of personal transformation for participants but limited impact as a change agent and confusion by the various stakeholders (community representatives, planners) as to whether the purpose of the participatory process was to engage in ‘societal guidance’ or ‘social transformation’.

PENNY GURSTEIN

AddressPennyGursteSchool of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada, [email protected]

School of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada

Cinema Representation and Place-making:

Tewdwr-Jones's exploration of cinema representation as an interpretive device for place-making points to another fascinating use of film and video as a way to deepen our understanding of place attachment. Through popular culture we begin to see how spaces and places are inhabited and bestowed with meanings. Similar to Attili's quest for geographic imagining through digital ethnography, Twedwr-Jones calls for planners to use cinema to understand the emotive notions of place.

In her introduction to this Interface, Sandercock situates the potential for multimedia to influence policy and as a tool for community development. While certainly the potential is there, I would argue that to establish its effectiveness we need to think critically about how and when it can be the most effective and who are the appropriate stakeholders in its production and analysis. To become a valuable tool necessitates the rethinking of planning processes, ethical standards and protocols.

The power of the medium is evident in its ability to not only tell a story but to shape it. Film and video are highly susceptible to techniques (e.g. juxtaposed images) of viewer manipulation. How will digital story telling not become susceptible to these influences? While showing multiple points of view can address some of this medium's predisposition, other processes and techniques need to be developed for participants and viewers that foster reflexivity in the on-going examination of underlying assumptions and narratives.

The penetration of media, especially with our increasing reliance on the Internet for information, entertainment and commercial transactions, means that we are vulnerable to public scrutiny and surveillance in the most private aspects of our lives. Could the use of multimedia in planning processes add to this scrutiny? As is found in any planning methodology, the planning process, and being clear about the context and biases, is as important as the output.

Lefebvre (1991) argues that ideologies are embedded and inscribed in our social spaces, and that these spaces are used as a means to control, dominate and regulate social practices. Multimedia tools are entrenched in societal processes, and as such are entwined with power dynamics. Who has control of the tools and the information generated (i.e. who sends information to whom?) and who is served by the technologies? Who can and do participate in generating, analyzing and interpreting the output from multimedia, how is it used to engage concerned stakeholders, and what legitimacy does that output have in generating policies? To expand the language of planning to include multiple publics in decision making requires community-building and enhancing the dialogue between the state and civil society.

It is also necessary to consider the range of information and communication technologies and tools that can be used in planning processes, especially since the convergence of media through the computer, television, and telephone makes our access to communication tools ever expanding. Text messaging from cell phones has become a powerful conduit for mobilization. Virtual realities (see secondlife.com) while mainly populated by those seeking personal fantasies, are also being tested for their application as immersive environments for community formation and socio-spatial analysis. Some of the modes of communication generated by information and communication technologies promote decentralized community-based information gathering and decision making, while others reinforce centralized and hierarchical structures.

So where does this position multimedia in planning processes? It is a powerful tool that can be integrated with other planning initiatives to interpret the environments we inhabit, and engage and teach communities and their planners about themselves and their needs. To motivate and empower people to take action to change their lives, however, requires a range of process-based communication and mobilization initiatives (including, but not solely, multimedia) that can build trust, promote community formation and facilitate dialogue. We are only at the cusp of the potential use of multimedia in planning and as such these authors have identified through their interesting and provocative papers questions that will have to be addressed in future research.

PENNY GURSTEIN

AddressPennyGursteSchool of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada, [email protected]

School of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada

PENNY GURSTEIN

AddressPennyGursteSchool of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada, [email protected]

School of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada

Acknowledgements

Graeme Dunstan is Australia's pre-eminent community artist. I thank him for his generous and passionate collaborations over 17 years and for his comments on this article. I also acknowledge the creativity, bravery and expertise of landscape architect Kevin Taylor, planner-urban designer Kelvin Walsh and artist Edward Car. Many of the processes described in this article are chronicled in the suite of five books, Community Participation in Practice (especially the Casebook), written and edited by staff and former staff of Sarkissian Associates Planners and published by Murdoch University. They are listed in the references.

Notes

1. The 13-minute videotape earned us many professional accolades, boosted our confidence and helped enormously in training. The video received two Australian professional awards and the project, video and the resulting Welcome Home manual were short-listed for the UN World Habitat Award in 1992 and 1993. The Urban Land Authority continued to use a somewhat less ambitious version of the workshop model with new land purchases in Timbarra and other estates for several years, with the videotape, The Beginning of Something, used as a training tool for the workshops.

2. The URLA was the ULA with a new name. It has now morphed into a different organization, VicUrban. From a distance, it appears that archetypal psychology and myth no longer play a conscious role in their planning processes.