Speakers
Description
Street transformations are often complex processes that must navigate diverse perspectives and competing interests, making consensus-building both essential and challenging. Narrative-based approaches, such as storytelling and role-playing, offer a powerful means to bridge these gaps by fostering empathy, promoting reflective thinking, and enabling a shared understanding of different viewpoints. In the StreetForum project, we developed, tested and evaluated three narrative-driven tools aimed at engaging stakeholders in Brussels, Istanbul, Stockholm, and Vienna in 2024.
These tools – Stakeholder personas, Storytelling game and Rich pictures.talk – encouraged participants to reflect on their lived experiences, share them with others and walk in someone else’s shoes. While they demonstrated great potential to support street transformations, their use was not without obstacles. Participants’ familiarity with the street, time constraints, and the varying cultural and social contexts significantly influenced the tools’ effectiveness.
This presentation will introduce these StreetForum tools, their development process and their impact assessment, reflecting on the benefits and challenges of using them. It will provide recommendations on how to best use narrative-driven tools, such as ensuring flexibility and accessibility to different stakeholder needs and cultural settings.
