Giovanni Attili

Digital Ethnography as Planning Praxis: An Experiment with Film as Social Research, Community Engagement and Policy Dialogue

Stories and storytelling are part of a post-positivist paradigm of inquiry influenced by phenomenology, ethnography and narrative analysis, along with the evolution of visual methods in social research. New information and communication technologies today provide the opportunity to explore storytelling through multimedia, including video/filmmaking, in what we describe as digital ethnography. While there has been a tradition in the planning field of using film for advocacy purposes since the 1920s, we argue for a new direction informed by collaborative planning theory and situational ethics. This paper reports on a three-year, three-stage research project in which we experimented with the use of film as a mode of inquiry, a form of meaning making, a way of knowing, and a means of provoking public dialogue around planning and policy issues (in this case, community development and the social integration of immigrants). We explored the expressive as well as analytical possibilities of film in conducting social research and provoking community engagement and dialogue, taking advantage of the aesthetic and involving dimensions of film as narrative. The research question was a socio-political one: how do immigrants become integrated into a specific social fabric, and how do they acquire a sense of belonging? The site of the research was a culturally diverse neighbourhood in the city of Vancouver, and the specific focus was a place-based local institution, the Collingwood Neighbourhood House. The paper concludes with critical reflections on the use of film in this research project, focusing on ethical issues, power relationships, insider/outsider dilemmas, and reciprocity.

Changing the Lens: Film as Action Research and Therapeutic Planning Practice

This paper discusses an action research project in which the making and screening of a film was conceived as a catalyst for social change in a deeply divided community. The context is the history of segregation of Indigenous peoples and settlers in Canada. Is there a decolonizing role for planning, beginning with the work of healing and reconciliation? And, is there a role for film as a methodological tool in such a process? Our findings suggest a very necessary role for therapeutic planning, albeit with caveats; and, that film can be an effective catalyst for creating this therapeutic space.

Beyond the Flatlands: Digital Ethnographies in the Planning Field

New technologies represent a system of constraints and possibilities that constitute the foundation of new rhetorical spaces: the spheres of new communicative and persuasive procedures. Nowadays, urban planning has the chance to critically and rigorously experiment with these new spaces. It has the chance to transgress traditional representational codes and to expand its semantic horizons.

Representations of an Unsettled City: Hypermedial Landscapes in Rome

Globalisation represents the empirical condition of the contemporary world, probably the most meaningful sign of an epoch facing a deep transition phase: it is a condition of complex connectivity, which is characterised by an intensification of interconnections and of global interdependence (Tomlinson, 1999). The increasing migratory phenomena are surely one of the most visible aspects of this new post-modern condition: these phenomena are significantly changing places, experiences, our way of being in the world. Western societies are intersected by the presence of ethnic subjectivities and are becoming more and more fragmented and complex. Cities are changing into a mixture of differences, contradictions and conflicts. The multiplication of spatial signification processes, the new temporariness of individual lives, the new way of living and interacting with the territory, testify to a deep change.

Ri-appropriarsi della città. Un’introduzione

This article focuses on the practices and processes of reappropriating the city. These movements and initiatives (organised to varying extents) use, modify and manage different parts of the urban environment, feeding them back into the ‘life cycle’ of the cities themselves, a complex set of phenomena increasingly characterising contemporary urban settings. This section aims to build a theoretical basis, drawing on a wealth of experience, for an extremely complex, multi-faceted subject that is tricky to interpret and categorise. Although the approach is inevitably tentative and incomplete, it can form the basis for a new critical debate about how to reappropriate the city.

Città, lucciole e profanazioni

A by-product of today’s multi-faceted economy, based on finance as much as production, is the delineation of the new landscapes of living and residing, as the economy replaces politics in conferring meaning on places. The virtually unstoppable march of the capitalist religion is laying waste the social and territorial fabric. However, the decline is not homogeneous and uniform. It conceals interstices and fractures, things discarded and forgotten, that can inform different paths and potential ways of existing. Little heresies undermining the prevailing orthodoxy. Arenas where new practices, forms of life, and experimental collectives have the potential to generate territorial initiatives that break out of the recognised institutional frameworks.