Here is my full presentation to National Planning Conference with the American Planning Association!
This is a starter-guide to spatial narratology, and how to build narrative infrastructure. I cover:
1. Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition as urban planning codes.
2. How to transform tragic narratives into comedic narratives

Cross-sectional stakeholder engagement has a limited shelf-life, high cost, often comes after an urban change is pre-conceived. Longitudinal approaches allows urban change professionals to leverage ethnographic GIS methods to map sentiment for reuse, research, and stress-testing of future proposals. Cities are frame-stories, therefore planners are storytellers. Mapping narratives takes subjective data and objectively anchors it to places. Narrative maps enable planners, developers, representatives, and the public to know the stories on a street corner, to compare them to neighbouring stories, and tell new stories as subsequent chapters of those stories from the past. This couching of proposals in the context of the past engenders continuity in the perspective of the stakeholders: their stories extended into the future.

Viewers will be introduced to the methods of spatial narratology and a case-study conducted at the medieval walled city Famagusta, Cyprus.

How to make Spatial Narratology:

1. Leverage ethnographic methods to build a robust narrative infrastructure
2. Identify narrative coding schemes to foster creation of new narratives in continuity with old narratives
3. Guide stakeholders new stories away from tragic and toward comedic narrative-arcs