Stories are central to planning practice: to the knowledge it draws on from the social sciences and humanities, to the knowledge it produces about the city, to ways of acting in the city.
Planning is performed through story, in a myriad of ways. And since storytelling has evolved from oral tales around a campfire to the technologically sophisticated forms of multimedia available in the early twenty-first century, it is surely time for the urban professions to appreciate the multifarious potential of these new media. All the more so since the planning and design fields have been forced by the demands of civil society to be more engaged with communities, more communicative.
This is where we started experimenting with story-telling and film-making, reaching into the epistemological heart of planning. Through long-term research-in-action processes we tried to test films: as devices that are potentially able to build multidimensional and polyphonic representation of urban life; as potential catalysts for interaction inside planning processes.