VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

View film

The Listening City is a collaborative interdisciplinary project that aims to explore Digital Storytelling as a tool for placemaking and as a community-building approach to inspire dialogue and mutual understanding across diverse groups within an urban context. As stories convey values and emotions, they are very effective in revealing the differences and similarities between people’s experiences (East, Leah et al. 2010). When those experiences are linked to a particular context, stories become a magnifier of people’s sense of place. Within this project, Bredäng, a public housing neighbourhood South of Stockholm, and Mälarhöjden, the garden neighbourhood, were selected as case study areas, considering their very different socio-economic status, despite being divided only by a tunnel. The project team consisted of a group of landscape architects from Landskapslaget, Sweden, an academic with a background in History and Computer Science from Loughborough University, UK, a storyteller from Kenya, and representatives from the City of Stockholm. Within the context of this project, the team conceived digital storytelling as “a means of sharing knowledge, building trust, and cultivating identity” (Cianca et al 2014) and interpreted stories as a sort of “holistic thinking” (Meadows, 2009). The team has in particular looked at how applied storytelling could enable the two communities on the two sides of the tunnel to come together, dismantle social barriers and turn a neglected space into a place of joint belonging.