Narrative infrastructure makes personal memory meaningful to how we collectively evolve our communities. By mapping oral histories in Cyprus, we move memories from minds and books to the landscape. By mapping memories to an area of influence, they can overlap one another and other relevant economic, policy, conflict, and environmental data sets. We can propose design or policy responses that largely rely on the authentic voice of locals, building a future in continuity with local living memory.
Local
Cyprus
Famagusta Walled City
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
2019-06-01
As an individual
First name: Jason Last name: Winn Gender: Prefer not to say Nationality: United States If relevant, please select your other nationality: Canada Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: #25 Necip Tözün sk Town: Famagusta Postal code: 99450 Country: Cyprus Direct Tel:+1 210-807-0969 E-mail:info@narrativeinfrastructure.org Website:https://www.narrativeinfrastructure.org/
Narrative infrastructure at Famagusta was a pilot project to demonstrate the application of spatial narratology in a city subject to recent armed conflict. By leveraging a fundamental tool, storytelling, this project allowed a community to explore its own sentiments, identify hitherto obscure bias, and discuss proposals for land use to address that bias. Memories turn “space” into “place”. Our sense of emplacement, via our memories, is triggered by visual references from our space. Evolved urban spaces are reflective of many thousands of authors’/ stakeholders’ stories over decades and centuries held by the landscape. This plural collection of memories embodies the illusive “sense of place”. The loss of visual cues from the urban fabric, a loss of the sense of the place, is why the trauma of urban renewal lasts for decades. To mitigate this trauma, renewal should be a pluralistic effort derived primarily from local stories, and ongoing development should leverage the same process by elaborating on existing local stories rather than imposing foreign ideas. The Narrative infrastructure project at Famagusta demonstrates how to make sensitive decisions today, tomorrow, and in years to come based on the archives of memories. This is not offered notionally or city-wide, but city block by city block. Ultimately, every human wants to live a meaningful life, and to see their sense of meaning reflected in their surroundings. There is no more clear definition of “local agency” than to have a meaningful impact on your community by speaking and being heard. This project explored how to build narrative infrastructure using the oral histories of the local population.
Inclusive
Continuity
Authenticity
Storytelling
Agency
Something that is sustainable needs to be eminently improvable and actionable. My literature review highlighted a geographically accurate story in Australia that had been transmitted in a strictly oral mode for at least 450 generations (the story referenced landscape features only visible during the last ice-age due to lower sea-levels). This trans-epoch technology: storytelling, is leveraged by narrative infrastructure. The Famagusta pilot project demonstrates a modern method for decisions of incremental change of built fabric and policy landscape based on the authentic voice of the local populace. This proposed public narrative infrastructure is not made of concrete installed by contractors; it is made of stories told by individuals. As both the primary beneficiaries and primary source of narrative infrastructure, the community owns both the fruits and obligation for its maintenance. With each added story, the narrative fabric becomes stronger and more useful. While these narratives have a relatively near time-horizon (up to one lifetime), they are geographically compatible with environmental spatial data sets. This allows for local memory to be contextualized with historic and climate issues which have longer time horizons, providing personal relatability to the science that otherwise seems unimpactful to individual goals. Conversely, it will highlight when local narratives do not coincide with larger time scales, indicating the precise dissonance that needs to be bridged by policy makers and scientists to achieve local support. Moreover, it will provide a contextual archive of local values that may well be impacted by climate change. Using narratology, the designer, policy maker, scientist, developer (any agent of urban or regional change) can use the local narratives as a preceding chapter to the story they need to tell, using story-craft as the mode of communication rather than relying on raw data, promises, foreign precedent, or appeals to fear.
Converting tragedy into comedy: the cultural objective of narrative infrastructure. Monumentation and regular celebrations are intended to make cultural identity inhabit the domain through either works or ritual. Prior to the advent of Geographic Information Systems and computerized cartographic methods, imposing one’s personal identity on public space was considered art work at best or graffiti at worst. Using a digital space that is an analog to public space, we have created a map of the shared identity of individuals organized by actual space. These memories are not limited by time, as participants can share their memories to the geographic archive, and the land becomes the index of those memories. My project leveraged an a priori code set to categorize the memories based on Hannah Arendt’s text, The Human Condition. This allows users of the archive to turn on and off stories by theme, and to discover patterns in the semantic and emotional landscape. Of course, not all stories are happy stories, but using adjoining or co-located stories, users can propose new narratives that while based on the tropes of heroic sacrifice, or hubris, or corruption, can leverage actual authentic stories from nearby to propose new policies or projects to convert the ongoing narratives from tragic arcs to comedic story arcs. This approach does not require a great deal of special training, as most people know how to appreciate a story.
The technique of spatial narratology requires the participants to tell their story. In this respect, it is undemanding of participants, allowing for nearly universal accessibility and affordability. This can be accomplished in multiple formats: audio, video, written; real time or recorded. The commercial software used is free as of this submission, and the technology used was an entry-level personal computer and digital camera. This is the technical limitation of this technique for data gatherers. My pilot project is a proof of concept, with n=5, but by leveraging the oldest technology in human history—storytelling—this project concept is accessible to billions of people.
The local population of Famagusta have important stories to tell. As a city subject to ethnic conflict in living memory, the post-trauma stress of that conflict is perpetuated by policies of hundreds of nation states to this day. As a community that is struggling to maintain its identity while unrecognized as a political people, their stories are critical to the sustainment of a 700-year-old built fabric and a way of life. In recovering from disasters such as fires and war, communities often bare the stamp of some singular authority. Such redevelopments are inherently creatures of that author, hence author-itarian. When singular and total in their narrative, they are total-itarian. Establishing a decentralized archive of local narratives, one immune from manipulation by special interests who would limit the plurality of narratives, Famagustians have started to build an unassailable fortress against totalitarianism. Their mapped stories have a meaningful influence on their own homes. The stories were collected by the civil society association Mağusa Suriçi Derneği, which houses a print copy of the project in their physical library. This civil society continues to collect stories every Saturday morning.
The success of this project was predicated on the involvement of the local participants, the local university and its professors, the data partner civil society, and the regional politicians. From this varied group of stakeholders arouse a cadre of translators from Türkiye and referrals to other data holders (expansion plans of the Famagusta Narrative Infrastructure includes mapping of a further 700 oral histories already collected by researchers from the other side of the ethnic divide of Cyprus). The agendas of local citizens, academics from afar, and regional politicians coalesced around vision of not only establishing who Famagustians were/are, but who they could become.
This project is fundamentally an a priori spatial ethnography that defines a toolbox borrowed from the application of narratology and community engagement. Utilizing the political theories of human communities as developed in Hannah Arendt’s work, the mass of data produced by the community engagement was digestible into discreet anecdotes with reported discreet geographic locations. The academic developers of Narrative Policy Framework Analysis provided a wealth of ideas for how to leverage the nature of stories in political action, thereby improving the agency of the participants. Both the study of narratology and modes of storytelling indicated a way to apply the narrative data to the design process. First, the most important lesson was that a community context has a history that must be foundational to new proposals or the sense of continuity is broken in the minds of the locals. This does not suggest we forbid innovation, only to temper innovations that are based on foreign solutions.
Based on the data collected in the project, the story theme of subjective wellbeing, or “happiness”, was significantly underrepresented. The stakeholders agreed with me that this had deep and broad implications for the general attitude of the community towards their own neighborhood. Given the framework presented by Hannah Arendt’s work, the solutions discussed included adding new opportunities to labor in the neighborhood (labor being generative to subjective wellbeing per Arendt’s model). This was well received by the neighborhood association members and has been introduced as a theme to the local faculty of architecture who have since implemented it in student projects for proposals of various empty lots in the neighborhood. A meta-narrative of “meaningless” historic works in Famagusta was also identified in the data. Being of Ottoman decent, the current culture did not build the majority of the tangible cultural heritage of Famagusta. The majority of the existing assets are exemplars of Venetian and Lusignanian culture that pre-date Ottoman rule, layered upon by British colonial assets from the post-Ottoman period. With no sense of ownership or rituals associated with those assets, the current culture does not identify with them. This suggests a reason for the apparent cultural apathy that is a major challenge in preservation and conservation of the tangible cultural heritage assets.
Cross-sectional verses longitudinal planning/design: A significant limitation of conventional planning and urban management practices is the cross-sectional process: only those stakeholders with awareness and time in their schedule have the potential to be involved in discreet projects. Stakeholders who do commit their time and energy are limited to the single project under consideration and those contributions are almost never reused later. In narrative infrastructure, the stakeholders contribute a map of their personal memories, discretely mapping their sense of place in a narrative spatial archive. In this manner they are always contributing their geographically relevant story rather than having to respond to each new project. Narrative infrastructure forever embeds the meaningfulness of their life experiences in the land itself. Every reconstruction or development project can begin generating ideas by narratively extending and building upon the memories of local stakeholders in the spatial archive. When developers fail to use local narratives, opponents can legitimately criticize developers’ ethics for failing to incorporate the known past of the specific location. Stakeholders and critics can make the justifiable claim that the proposal is harming the sense of place (and they will be able to prove this using data from the spatial archive). This longitudinal and pluralistic approach does not obviate planners, regulators, and developers from doing cross-sectional stakeholder engagement. Details must be addressed with inputs from specialists. But with narrative infrastructure, local support is improved because the concept themes are foundationally local, while outreach can be targeted and more efficient.
Oral histories were collected by the data partner Mağusa Suriçi Derneği in the preceding three years prior to the project using a DSLR camera in video mode. Sixty oral histories were granted with limited license to the project manager. Given the limitation on funding, five of these were chosen at random to be in the project. Those were then coded using qualitative analysis software (Atlas.TI v.7) using the thematic code set derived from Hannah Arendt’s text, The Human Condition. From those five oral histories, over eighty anecdotes were associated with discreet physical locations. These were mapped using Google Earth Pro and post-processed with ArcGIS Desktop. The area of effect assigned to the anecdotes was determined by three factors: 1. The average walking speed of an elderly adult, 2. The available pedestrian network, 3. The average time (five minutes) it takes the human mind to encode the location of a memory through the process of assigning associated waypoints in the near vicinity. This provided a service area of each anecdote of 220 meters plus 10 meters to either side for average visual acuity. These polygons are overlayed together, with the ability to toggle them by participant and by theme. The interface allows the user to select a specific location and read the stories located there.
Provided the local context has a common latitude and longitude cartography, the spatial narratology method is useful to any place of human habitation. This project was conducted with recorded narratives but can be adapted to ancient narratives as well as narrative infrastructure specific stories. Communities can begin to map their narratives to a spatial infrastructure that will mature with time, growing more nuanced and data-rich with each contribution. This method can be adapted to contextualizing archives of digitized cultural artifacts, providing a spatially indexed archive.
Narrative infrastructure has the potential to improve cultural understanding between peoples, to inform future development, and to increase the long-term agency of participants. Short-term development goals are easy to identify when specific longitudinal sentiment data is available. Reductivist political messages that ignores local nuance can be rhetorically undercut leveraging the authentic voice of local stories. Mapped stories provide a longitudinal enhancement to the natives, migrants, or refugees of any gender, and aids mobility of modern people by providing a wealth of narratives specific to their adopted home. Wherever it is employed, narrative infrastructure helps to overcome language barriers, social stigma, and a lack of local cultural knowledge. Be they migrant just off the bus or politician with deep family roots, everyone can make use of a robust local narrative infrastructure to build understanding by mapping what is meaningful.
