Stinging Real! Four Essays on the Transformative Power of Films and Storytelling in Planning Education

Section: Stinging Real and The Power Of Storymentioning

confidence: 96%

A Memoir for Andrew Isserman

Boyce

2012

“…The attention to vision and visioning, forecasting and focusing on the future turned more recently into an interest in case studies, compelling narratives, and even story telling (e.g., Isserman 2010, Isserman et al 2010). In part, this derived from his experience in a new a course he developed at the University of Illinois.…”

Section: Andy Isserman’s Perspective On Regional Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Andy Isserman’s Regional Science

Anselin

2012

“…In recent years, Isserman focused on the necessary role of stories and storytelling to ground planning in the richness and diversity of the present and to appreciate the past, summarized in Isserman et al (2010). In his recent teaching, he coupled film and novels with economic data to help understand regional cultures and economies, relying on the charismatic alchemy of fact and story to both inform and inspire his students-in part because of a perceived lack of reflection on the centrality of narratives in social science and design fields generally but especially in regional planning education and practice.…”

Section: Recommend That We Think Big… [Lest] In Our Rush To Be Relementioning

confidence: 99%

Shaping the Future through Narrative

Isserman

Markusen

2012

Throughout his scholarly career, Andrew Isserman made bold calls for vision, storytelling, and narrative construction in regional science and planning. The necessity to plan and make infrastructure and development decisions with incomplete evidence often requires narratives-gists, insights and ideas that are shorthand for an amalgam of reasoning, evidence, and feedback from practice. Narratives play a large role in planning practice and education, but their premises and implications must be subjected to evidence and compared with alternatives. From our respective work on the third sector, we explore a powerful narrative that bigger organizations are better: due to economies of scale, more professional personnel, more sustainable operations, and better measurement, they deliver superior services and greater public value for resources spent. We compare this with a competing narrative that smaller organizations generate superior social returns due to flexibility, innovativeness, and community-embeddedness. Using evidence on nonprofit arts and cultural organizations, we show that the superiority of large organizations is questionable and further, that the "bigger is better" narrative serves particular interests. In concluding, we underscore Isserman's argument that planners and regional scientists must consciously and deliberately claim their roles in the creation of narratives that shape debate, planning process, and, ultimately, the future. In teaching and research, we must both acknowledge whose interests are served and harness evidence to compelling visions, explicit theories of causality, and story arcs-the tools that planners, regional scientists, designers and social scientists use in defining, shaping, and imagining our regional worlds.