Story and Sustainability Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities

by Eckstein, Barbara; Throgmorton, James A.

• ISBN13: 9780262550437
• ISBN10: 0262550431
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-05-23
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• More Book Details

Summary

Story and Sustainabilityexplores the role of story in planning theory and practice, with the goal of creating U.S. cities able to balance competing claims for economic growth, environmental health, and social justice. In the book, urban practitioners and scholars from fields as diverse as American studies, English, geography, history, planning, and criminal justice reflect critically on the traditional exclusionary power of storytelling and on its potential to facilitate the transformations of imagination, theory, and practice necessary to create sustainable, democratic American cities. The book begins with an editors' introduction identifying story, sustainable U.S. cities, and democracy as the three key themes. Part I advances and refines these concepts, connects them to contemporary U.S. urban planning, and provides tools that can be used when reading and interpreting the texts in part II. Part II exemplifies, amplifies, and modifies the key themes and arguments through the presentation of eight texts: theoretical and experiential, academic and nonacademic, expository and narrative, and familiar and unfamiliar. The combined focus on story and urban sustainability makes this book a unique contribution to planning literature.

Author Biography

Barbara Eckstein is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa.

James A. Throgmorton is Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Iowa.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Contributors	ix
Introduction: Blueprint Blues	1	(8)
Barbara Eckstein
James A. Throgmorton
I Storytelling, Sustainability, Democracy, and the American City	9	(70)
Making Space: Stories in the Practice of Planning	13	(26)
Barbara Eckstein
Imagining Sustainable Places	39	(26)
James A. Throgmorton
Democracy, Storytelling, and the Sustainable City	65	(14)
Robert A. Beauregard
II Raising Questions/Raising Cain	79	(164)
The Old Neighborhood	87	(26)
Carlo Rotella
Ceola's Vision, Our Blessing: The Story of an Evolving Community-University Partnership in East St. Louis, Illinois	113	(30)
Kenneth M. Reardon
Dreaming the Sustainable City: Organizing Hope, Negotiating Fear, Mediating Memory	143	(24)
Leonie Sandercock
In Search of a New Landfill Site	167	(18)
Michael Berkshire
Narrative and Other Tools	185	(10)
Seymour J. Mandelbaum
The Peninsula	195	(12)
Karin Franklin
Tales of a Geographer-Planner	207	(20)
Edward W. Soja
The Meanest Streets	227	(16)
Joe Barthel
Notes	243	(6)
References	249	(12)
Index	261