Planning
as Storytelling: Sustaining America’s Cities Planning
as Storytelling: Sustaining America’s Cities Barbara Eckstein (English) and James Throgmorton (Urban and Regional Planning), Directors
June 15-17, 2000
English-Philosophy
Building 304
"Planning as Storytelling: Sustaining America’s Cities," will bring together urban practitioners such as urban and regional planners and urban social justice workers with scholars from the disciplines of urban history, literary narrative, and urban planning. This cross-disciplinary link of historical, literary, and planning narratives will provide an unusual and needed conversation. The conversation will bring the historian’s record of the past and the planner’s projection of the future together with the literary critic’s understanding that all such records and projections are constructed stories which stipulate their own definitions of facts, of the past, and of the future. It will also be an unusual conversation beyond academia including urban practitioners from Iowa and other states. What is at stake in such intertwined narratives is the fate of U.S. cities, for this future depends on, in large part, the ability of various urban practitioners and theoreticians to hear the multiple stories of all those groups and individuals who have a stake in the economic well-being, environmental health, social justice, and ethical vivacity of urban life.
As long as one assumes that numbers convey facts and that stories convey feelings, those who work to produce numbers and those who work to produce narratives are likely to misunderstand one another. This seminar is posited on the premise that multiple ways of defining and conveying persuasive facts are storytelling and that this storytelling is a necessary and sustaining humanistic activity. Maps tell stories. Tables of numbers tell stories. These and many other media are representations of reality that require knowledge to be read and interpreted. Each session of the seminar will test this humanistic premise.
In the first day and a half, our six "storytellers," as we think of them, will each offer a forty-minute presentation in which they position themselves within the conventions of their professions explaining what counts as facts in those professions and what tools of persuasion--linguistic, visual, numerical--are common. Each storyteller will provide at least one case study. Three storytellers (two are from Iowa) are non-academics and three are academics. In the last day and a half, four urban scholars--one historian, two planning theorists, and one geographer--will attempt to imagine how we might bring all of these six stories and their diverse ideas of fact and persuasion into the same conversation about the sustainability of U.S. cities. This brief description cannot do justice to the exciting experience and expertise that these ten people bring to the symposium. From the poorest communities of Oakland and East St. Louis, to the Mississippi Delta, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Iowa’s Waterloo, and back to the University of Iowa campus itself, these thinkers have considered and reconsidered the forces that threaten and sustain urban life.
Participants:
There will be no registration fee; however, we do need to know who plans to attend. Please RSVP to: Jay Semel, Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, N134 Oakdale Hall, University of Iowa, IA 52242-5000 or e-mail: Jay-Semel@uiowa.edu
Sponsoring organizations: the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, Humanities Iowa, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Graduate Collage, the Office of the Provost, the Department of English, the Department of Urban and Regional Planning
Participant biographies -> Schedule ->