IN-PERSON London. Section B

Abstract

As the city grows ever more intricate, it elicits the question: how can we ‘professionally’ contribute to the livability of a complex urban situation that we know almost nothing about? In response, this paper introduces Urban Scripting as a transdisciplinary site assessment process that uses audio-visual storytelling and voices from the city margin to provide a path to the knowledge necessary to contribute. The approach understands the city as an assemblage of differences and as an unpublished script of possibilities. In Johannesburg, one of the most unequal cities in the world, it is written from the viewpoint of the twilight zone, where others, for their daily enterprise, carefully remake spaces considered inhabitable by some. Intersecting the documentary with the imaginary, life [as lived] is captured in 24 frames per second. The paper combines narrative theory and the moving image as a reading protocol to review the making of two Ph.D. research outputs: a film and an animation about a tree on a sidewalk in Johannesburg’s Alexandra Township. Using these stories, it interrogates the moving frame’s ability to give insight into emergent urban phenomena and situates the story and the storyteller’s voices in the everyday. Semiotically, storytelling demonstrates, at different scales, how Urban Scripting establishes a language to imagine, see, and convey the city’s making. This fusion of moving frames provides signposts and access codes to the rich, sophisticated, and varied urban tapestry constructed by multiple authors of a city.