Author:

Keywords:

morphing, participatory research, place making, storytelling, urban development, Social Sciences, Social Issues, Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary, Social Sciences - Other Topics, citizen participation, cultural heritage, design, emplacement, inclusion, mapping, pilot study, placemaking, PARTICIPATION, 1608 Sociology, 4403 Demography, 4410 Sociology

Abstract:

Traditional top-down placemaking practices are increasingly being challenged through more participatory approaches that build on community voice. Yet, due to top down sampling broad inclusion remains challenging. Moreover, there is a continuous effort to take into account place agency. This article explores the StoryMapper, a placemaking tool that addresses the lack of inclusion by setting up a ‘chain of engagement’, a self-steering sampling approach between citizens by passing a tangible tool from resident to resident and by continuing the dialogue on a living map. This tangible tool invited participants to ‘morph’, i.e., augment the environment with their ideas, thereby taking an emplaced approach. In this article, we report on the conceptualization and pilot phase of the StoryMapper, a tool developed to engage citizens in re-imagining their neighborhood in relation to the reconversion of a community church. We discuss the potential of the ‘chain of engagement’ approach to include different groups of citizens through multimodality into participatory placemaking processes. The study showed that inclusion should not only be evaluated based on who participates and who does not, but also on how the tool itself, in its capacity to visualize complex ideas, facilitates participation of different publics.