Place identity of a neighborhood is constructed as an “assemblage” of the values of various places that exist in the community and are recognized by various people. The “Your Place Story” program, which has been conducted since past years, has aimed to develop community archives by asking participants to share a story about a place that is deeply etched in their minds through their personal experiences. This year’s workshop is an expanded version of the previous ones. Participants discussed local place identities that emerge as “assemblages” of individual stories, opinions, and sentiments, and imagined new “stories” that they would like to realize in the future. Using a future design tool newly developed for this workshop that uses cards to set up future scenarios in light of the change of values, the collaborative conceptualization of a future vision for the neighborhood that is considered as desirable as possible even when influenced by external factors that are not necessarily controllable is an experiment in the design of a place value-based urban planning process.
The workshop began with participants going out into the neighborhoods and taking photographs of local streetscapes that touched their hearts. After returning to the workshop venue, participants individually created a collage based on the photographs they had taken and verbalized the local values expressed in the collage using three keywords. Participants who walked through the same area then presented their collages and keywords to each other, and the group as a whole identified the three keywords that they collectively thought represent the value of the neighborhood. Finally, future design tools including “Value Foresight Cards” were introduced, and several alternative future scenarios were set up in which each of the identified values will grow, will be preserved, will be collapsed, or will be transformed to another. From these scenarios, the participants were asked to define one scenario they would like to realize and to propose a space or scene in which they would like to see if this scenario were to be realized. Through activities to think about the values of the neighborhoods by photographing the streetscapes they perceived as valuable and combining them with the perspectives of the other participants, and to select the most desirable future of the neighborhoods out of the scenarios, a methodology of the place-based future design of the neighborhoods was tested.
The group work resulted in the proposal of unique expressions of the neighborhood identities and interesting ideas for achieving a desirable future for those neighborhoods. We would like to further develop the workshop program as tried out this time and incorporate it into the early stages of the process of formulating neighborhood-scale plans or community development visions, aiming to contribute to the realization of urban planning that envisions the better future based on the value of the neighborhood.