Participatory Media

Abstract

Neighbourhood planning devolves power to communities to create their own planning policy but traditional forms of participation are still relied upon. And despite the ubiquitous nature of technology in society, digital participation methods are rarely used. In this paper, we outline fieldwork with two neighbourhood planning groups who used participatory media technology to improve engagement though the art of storytelling. We focus on the configuration of participatory media as a way to widen participation and enable story creation and sharing amongst citizens. We highlight that storytelling using media technology can provide a model of and a model for the way we 'do' neighbourhood planning whilst emphasising the challenges of ensuring processes are linked to tangible actions and encouraging the multiplicity of stories.

From Creating Spaces for Civic Discourse to Creating Resources for Action

“…63], as a way to bring the value of local knowledge and expertise to the fore. For example, some approaches have focused on storytelling as a means to lower the barrier to particpantion in urban planning [56], for civil society to show evidence of their work [34], and to gather counter narratives to be added to political debate [29] or to support social movements [28]. In this paradigm, stories are "linked to a 'equality of intelligence' not 'sanctioned' knowledge" [21:2966].…”

“…Within the shift to face-to-face and talk-based approaches there has also been a movement toward discursive and dialogue-based methods. For example, storytelling and experience-sharing has inspired designs and methods which focus on supporting the facilitation and capture of 'everyday talk' around issues and matters of importance to specific communities [21,34,56]. Less attention has been paid to how the capture of such material leads to action, however.…”

JourneyCam

“…Moreover, automatically preselecting clips for 'dispassionate' post-journey review, and conceiving them only as a form of 'objective' evidence, explicitly precludes important emotional or affective aspects of people's embodied experiences, and limits their agency in determining what matters to them in-the-moment. By contrast, participatory media and storytelling has been used to widen engagement in planning, via storyboarding and commissioning citizen narratives through phone-based video clips [50]. Through its ability to enable storytelling amongst citizens, participatory video was found to help to stimulate conversations about place, including in formal processes of civic engagement [50].…”

“…By contrast, participatory media and storytelling has been used to widen engagement in planning, via storyboarding and commissioning citizen narratives through phone-based video clips [50]. Through its ability to enable storytelling amongst citizens, participatory video was found to help to stimulate conversations about place, including in formal processes of civic engagement [50]. In their portability and ability to capture video and audio, mobile devices thus have the potential to generate rich data around people's lived experiences of place and mobility.…”

TalkFutures

“…As with most qualitative research, participants are generally more involved in data generation and capture and less in the analysis and reporting stages [52,64]. Technology offers exciting new opportunities to broaden engagement, but carries more demands for meaningful, structured participation [6,53,64], especially in geographically dispersed engagements as existing processes often fail to accommodate distributed participation beyond data capture [33,48].…”