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Monday, October 7, 2013

Storytelling and Placemaking


I enjoyed our first meeting of the new year, and I'm excited about exploring the role of storytelling in public dialogue, change making and engagement.   We also talked about the current buzz around Placemaking in Madison.

Here are a few resources I can offer --

  http://sharinglearningstories.wisc.edu/

  http://www.pps.org/reference/what_is_placemaking/

Let us know if you have other resources to share, and see you at our next meeting on October 24th.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for those resources, Catherine, as well as for getting Mark Wagler to come tell us stories about storytelling at our November meeting.

    For those of us who are curious about Mark, here's a link to a capsule bio and info about another event he did on campus:
    http://academictech.doit.wisc.edu/blogs/digitalstorytelling/june-2009-narrative-pedagogy

    The link you posted to the Project for Public Spaces' description of what placemaking is is particularly relevant to Madison right now. PPS has been hired to consult on citywide placemaking initiatives: There's a new year-round, indoor Public Market in the works, and last summer's "Make Music Madison" event was directly inspired by PPS's Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper model of pop-up placemaking. So stay tuned for the next chapter of this story as it unfolds around us!

    Some of you know that I'm enrolled in a Creative Placemaking program. The highlight for me so far has been the week we immersed ourselves in the role of storytelling in placemaking, and far and away my favorite reading was a piece by Leonie Sandercock called "From the Campfire to the Computer: An Epistemology of Multiplicity and the Story Turn in Planning." It's chapter 2 in a book for city/regional planners (sorry, I can't access the full citation, nor can I share the PDF here). The field of planning is evolving away from an engineered-space-and-infrastructure model toward a model of facilitated community-building in which storytelling becomes central. My take-away nugget from Sandercock's work is that "Planning is performed story"--a way of thinking about the environments we create that works at any scale and in every context I've tried it out in so far.

    Happy Halloween!
    Maya Lea


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  2. MADISON STORYTELLERS
    Part of the Night Light series at the Central Library's new makerspace, the Bubbler
    Friday, December 6th, 8-11pm; free

    --Maya

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  3. That Sandercock citation I mentioned above is:
    L. Sandercock & G. Attili (eds.), _Multimedia Explorations in Urban Policy and Planning_, (Urban and Landscape Perspectives, 7)

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