ABOUT Narrative İnfrastructure |
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Narrative İnfrastructure focuses on existing neighborhoods and helps them recognize and reinforce their informal traditions. Developers and politicians can use community story maps to enhance continuity with projects, contextualizing new initiatives with the local sense of identity. We do this by recording and mapping the oral history stories of the neighbourhood, and looking for patterns in the story themes that can be incorporated and expanded upon. |
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CHALLENGES
1. Individuals are increasingly isolated from social interactions, and local political interactions even more so. If they ever act politically, it is usually on a discreet issue. 2. Economic and policy proposals are largely built on statistics based on large groups, which rarely reinforces local character. In response, locals are disinclined to support such proposals. 3. Due to the increasing adoption of location-free digital socializing, the experience of diversity within our own communities has lost its primacy. This reinforces segregation by class and race, unraveling our inter-reliance. | ASPIRATIONS
How wonderful would it be to tell your individual story and effect how we all manage our common affairs? How wonderful would it be to act in your community and have no fear of being attacked or insulted? How wonderful would it be to know your personal history means something to your community and effects how your community is managed? | ||||
| Narrative İnfrastructure (Nİ) is around you right now, and always has been. | |||||
While their existence is not immediately obvious, stories are all around you: the house and office were someone’s story to a investor, a developer, a regulator, a contractor, and building inspector, and the fire marshal. At the root of all these formal stories is the fantastical story of a perfect home or the ambitious story of getting rich in real estate development. These stories are all around you all the time in the built environment. They are evolving and interfering with one another, creating new stories that is inspiring the action of those around you. Whether it be to go to work and earn a retirement, or to start a business, or to raise a family, or have a great time with friends, stories are the common currency of all people. |
The over-saturation of depth-less digital storytelling has led to people seeking live community storytelling. While media types have proliferated, oral storytelling plays the most diverse roll in the societies including teaching, mapping, entertainment, and convincing others of an argument (i.e. policy-craft). The persistence of communities is predicated upon leveraging policy (i.e. stories) to combine efforts and pool resources. Nİ integrates the voice of the community with research, policy, and development through the medium of GIS and the best practices of ethnography, converting the mute archives of communities to create a world-class research infrastructure. |
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VISION The community is the chorus: |
MISSION The integration of the stories of the community with research, policy, and development through the medium of Geographic Information System (GIS) and the best practices of ethnography by adapting the mute archives of communities to create a world-class research infrastructure with unparalleled cross-cutting capacity. |
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| QUALITIES | |||||
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Depth Nİ provides a longitudinal enhancement to the typical cross-sectional public participation process structured around surveys, focus groups, and scheduled meetings by prolonging the relevance of a stakeholder’s contribution. Communities can begin to map their narratives to a spatial infrastructure that will mature with time, growing more nuanced and data-rich with each contribution. |
Continuity Originally conceived as a socio-economic development tool, Nİ is designed to be used for commercial and political action. Nİ provides a longitudinal tool to the typical cross-sectional public participation process structured around surveys, focus groups, and scheduled meetings by providing spatial reference to a stakeholder’s contribution. |
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Mobility Nİ provides a longitudinal enhancement to the natives, migrants, or refugees of any sex, this story infrastructure aids mobility of modern people by providing a wealth of narratives specific to their adopted home. Nİ grants a sense of continuity, adding fine-grain detail to the sense of local history that historical survey texts omit in the spirit of brevity. This tool will allow communities to tell their stories block by block. |
Resilience The spatial contextualization of community sentiment improves urban resilience to natural and anthropogenic disasters. Past narratives can be seamlessly integrated into the disaster recovery process to reduce the psychological impact of disasters and an agency to a now traumatized local population. |
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Transformational In the most strict definition of "comic" there needs to be an expected ending that is defied. Where a community has overcome a negative reputation through "play" rather than "heroism" is inherently comic. The foundational theme of all comedy is humans succeeding together in spite the forces of entropy and short-term thinking. In a tragedy tale, the characters make a choice between two or more valuable goals, and one is sacrificed. Once the narrative landscape is made clear, we can craft new tales to convert tragedy into comedy. |
Timeless The stories will be indelibly referenced to place. The Nİ will provide a common platform for these voices to be heard and used to inform research, policy, and community integration. This will aid urban fabric continuity through guidance for new urban fabrics layered in by public and private interests. |
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| HOW YOU USE NARRATIVE İNFRASTRUCTURE | |||||
EMPOWER NEIGHBORHOODS Mitigate the trauma stemming from the loss of domain. Empower migrants to learn local stories so they can creatively evolve new stories in continuity. Demonstrate the co-location of history to living memory. Contextualizes visitor experience. |
DEVELOPMENT RISK MITIGATION Framing new urban proposals in continuity with community memory: Leverage continuity with the past when creating the future business plans and public agendas. Co-locates policy and economic development data with cultural heritage data to derive cultured development and policy outcomes. Improves site selection process as a risk-mitigation tool. Mitigate stakeholder animosity early. |
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HUMAN SCALE OF LOCAL POLICY Challenge conclusions derived from Big Data and large statistical sets applied to local contexts. Blunt opportunism and short-term thinking. Provide a legacy narrative tool to balance short-term political narratives on an ongoing basis. Orient from past to the future, helping to inform the decisions of the present. Narrative Infrastructure is a method of channelling the informal knowledge of the past into the formal planning of the future. Integrate with bureaucratic GIS systems, providing the location of sentiment. |
EMPOWER CIVIL SOCIETY Longitudinal public engagement tool to blunt opportunism and ensure the local stakeholder has a degree of agency. Provide a narrative-aggregating method developed with community participation. Provides an audience-centric frame for communicating science. Grant scientific research easy to access initial public input and help them contextualize their research for local audiences. Enhance participatory democracy through contextualized preservation of public input. Identifies cultural boundaries as opportunity zones for peace-building. |
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