Narrative in Urban Planning: A Practical Field Guide

What do planners need to know in order to use narrative approaches responsibly in their practice? This practical field guide makes insights from narrative research accessible to planners through a glossary of key concepts in the field of narrative in planning. What makes narratives coherent, probable, persuasive, even necessary – but also potentially harmful, manipulative and divisive? How can narratives help to build more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive communities? The authors are literary scholars who have extensive experience in planning practice, training planning scholars and practitioners or advising municipalities on how to harness the power of stories in urban development.

Lieven Ameel, born in 1978, is a senior lecturer in comparative literature at University of Tampere, Finland. He is co-founder and current president of the Association for Literary Urban Studies. In his research, he works on urban futures across textual genres, narrated experiences of space, and rhetorical structures in urban planning, among others.

Jens Martin Gurr, geb. 1974, ist Professor für britische und englischsprachige Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft an der Universität Duisburg-Essen. Er ist Mitbegründer und Sprecher des Kompetenzfeldes Metropolenforschung in der Universitätsallianz Ruhr (KoMet). Zu seinen Forschungsschwerpunkten gehören Literarische Stadtforschung, Theorien und Methoden der Stadt- und Metropolenforschung, Modelltheorie, Literatur und Klimawandel sowie die britische Literatur des 17. bis 21. Jahrhunderts und die zeitgenössische US-Literatur.

Barbara Buchenau, born in 1968, is a professor of North American studies at Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany, where she is heading the research group »Scripts for Postindustrial Urban Futures: American Models, Transatlantic Interventions«, nicknamed City Scripts, funded by the VolkswagenFoundation, at the Universitätsallianz Ruhr (2018-2022). Her research is dedicated to the powerful alignments between literature and the land across the centuries.