Multimedia Explorations in Urban Policy and Planning

Introduction.- Part One: Ethnography, Epistemology, History. Digital Ethnographies in the Planning Field. An Epistemology of Multiplicity: the story turn in planning. Film performs miracles: an exploration of the historical role of documentary films in planning.- Part Two: Contemporary Practices. Multimedia in urban policy and community development. Internet-based tools for Neighbourhood Planning and disaster recovery in New Orleans. (Re)Presenting the Street: Video and Visual Culture in Planning. Planning and Communication Technology: a universe of possibilities.Video as a Tool in Community Engagement: stories from an evolving practice. 'La campagna che si fa metropoli': a video camera, a script and a pc editing programme transform an occasion to describe a regional area in North East Italy into an instrument to discover it. Pigneto: film as stimulus to urban conversation. Seeing and Being Seen: Multimedia as a Reflexive Planning Methodology.Part Three: Teaching and Research with/without Multimedia in Planning. Digital Pedagogies in Planning. Where Strangers become Neighbours: digital ethnography in teaching and research. Does Participatory Design really matter? Film as an answer. Nurturing progressive imaginations through Multimedia: a story from Tijuana. How Robert Frost, DVDs, Your Students, and You Can Lift the Blinders of Social Segregation and Self-Censorship in Planning Education: a film and writing course.- Conclusions.

Leonie Sandercock is the author of ten books, the most recent of which include Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities (1998) and Cosmopolis 2: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century (2003). The latter book won the Paul Davidoff Award for best book awarded by the American Collegiate Schools of Planning. She also received the Dale Prize for Community Planning (2005), and the BMW Award for Intercultural Learning (2007), for her paper on 'Cosmopolitan Urbanism'. She co-authored with Giovanni Attili the book and DVD package Where Strangers become Neighbours: Integrating Immigrants in Vancouver, Canada (Springer, 2009).

Giovanni Attili is an Urban Planning PHD, Research Fellow at the University of Rome (La Sapienza) and Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia (UBC, Vancouver). He is recipient of the G.Ferraro Award for the best Urban Planning PhD Thesis in Italy in 2005. He is co-editor of the book "Storie di Citta" (Edizioni Interculturali, 2007), author of the book "La citta dei migranti" (Jaca Book, 2008) and co-author of the book and DVD package Where Strangers become Neighbours: Integrating Immigrants in Vancouver, Canada (Springer, 2009).

From the reviews:"This is a very admirable collection of essays, which greatly advances the intellectual project of treating stories and storytelling as crucial parts of planning and urban transformation. ... essays are meritorious, I find several of them to be especially valuable. ... the book is well worth reading by anyone interested in this particular frontier. ... Sandercock and Attili have provided a very fine piece of work ... . I would strongly encourage Sandercock and Attili to expand on this brilliant exploration of the frontier ... ." (James Throgmorton, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Vol. 31 (1), 2011)