The Role of New Media and Digital Narratives in Urban Planning and Community Development

Abstract

Many new urban developments are systematically planned and rapidly built and marketed, creating instant ‘communities’ in relatively dense concentrations. As a consequence, urban planners are turning to the social sciences, arts and humanities for answers to achieve socially sustainable developments. This paper discusses a narrative based approach to community engagement in the urban planning process. We describe the evolution of this approach and then give details of both a narrative resource kit as well as a method for arriving at this.

Keywords

• urban planning
• digital storytelling
• public history
• new media
• urban studies
• urban village
• urban informatics
• community engagement