IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

Urban Scripting is an urban design approach that uses audiovisual storytelling to frame social narrative as a form of site assessment in the African metropolis. Strategically, the practice develops techniques for calibrating socio-spatial imagination by merging African oral tradition with modern cinematic procedures to better understand users’ everyday experiences. Calibrating the city is an inclusive communication practice that captures and exposes detail of urban layers. Specifically voices from the ‘twilight zone,’ an in-between space of intense operation on the ground often overlooked by conventional tools. In the city street’s ‘gray’ areas, entrepreneurial users run a growing number of self-initiated and self-driven micro-enterprises to sustain their livelihood. Framing their spaces and activities into accessible narratives permits their voices to lead site assessment from the ground up. The process aims to ensure that more urban stakeholders have a role in defining the needs of the contemporary African city and for all to eventually understand its daily spatial environment and contribute to its imaginary. This paper deals with how the frame is a tool to capture urban processes and its application in calibrating the narrative of a city in motion.