Urban Storytelling:
Rebuild Place Understanding Via Immersive Narrative
Type: Master Thesis
Site: Downtown Providence, RI, US
Date: 02.2020 - 05.2020
Team: Individual Work
Instructor: Michael Blier
Tool: Rhino, Unreal Engine 4, Bonjour, Premiere, After Effect, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign
This thesis explores the use of storytelling in landscape architecture, specifically looking at the ways in which conventional analyses of stories used in spatial practices can flatten them into statistical data and keyword entries, resulting in places that do not support collective public imagination. It questions whether the current dominant narrative environments are inclusive enough for the subjectivity of place and whether ordinary people can tell their stories through the media we currently have. Additionally, it explores how immersive experiences can contribute to the storytelling process and whether hyper-reality storytelling can enrich people's understanding of a place. Using virtual and augmented reality, the study examines Providence's iconic public space and highlights the confluence of many stories about the city and its distinct communities, with the goal of reinforcing new senses of place and uncovering interesting and important spatial and temporal tensions between users, uses functions, and symbolism.
The Philosophy of “Place“
The concept of place has evolved over time, with geographers interpreting it not just as a physical location, but also as reflections of emotions and thoughts. It is now understood to be subjective and to have personalities that differentiate it from other places. Experience plays a crucial role in shaping a place, and Yifu Tuan has defined two types of places: "public symbols" and "fields of care." Public symbols are imageable and easily understandable, while fields of care are closely tied to personal and collective memory, and their building requires a certain amount of time and repetitive experience.
From Place to Placelessness
Tuan suggests that a place can only be fully understood from both perspectives.
The concept of spatiality is also important in understanding a place. The concepts of place and space are inseparable, with the main difference being their focus. Space is more about dimensions, shapes, or forms, while place focuses on how people respond to their physical surroundings. A place is structured by millions of experiences that people can possibly encounter in a certain space, and it is through these experiences that a place takes on meaning and significance for individuals and communities.
A Glimpse of Hutong by Yingyi Liu, 2017
Globalization and Urbanization: The Beginning of Placelessness
With the process of globalization and urbanization, there is a growing concern that distinctive places are being replaced by repetitive kitsch and losing their depth of meaning, resulting in a feeling of "placelessness." This homogeneity is not a new phenomenon, as there have always been areas sharing a certain degree of sameness due to similar cultural backgrounds and governance. However, what concerns people is the increasingly spreading scale of homogeneity regardless of background, which makes it difficult to feel a sense of place.
It is important to note that treating placelessness as entirely negative and declaring that the past was better than the present is too oversimplified. It is true that globalization and modernization bring convenience and efficiency to daily life. However, as a sense of place significantly contributes to cultural diversity and identities, it is still necessary to value and interpret the idea of place. This includes finding ways to preserve and enhance unique places, while also acknowledging the positive aspects of modernization and globalization.
Beijing
Guangzhou
Shenzhen
Shanghai
Tokyo
Singapore
Seoul
New York
An Attempt to Rebuild The Place
Many cities have been considering the issue of global placelessness in recent years, with professionals related to city development making efforts to retain cultural identities and identify place-making as one of their primary goals. In developing areas, there is more careful research and planning in the early design stage than ever before, and more thought is being given to preservation and renovation rather than reconstruction. In areas that were torn down and reconstructed, there have been numerous attempts to rebuild the place and revive its spirit.
Rebuilding a space is relatively easy, but rebuilding a place is much more difficult. Many places are dying because few locals accept them and few people visit. Social researchers Xingquan Wang and Huimin Wang argue that some of these failed attempts can be attributed to an overwhelming visual focus on the design process. Wenmin Zhuang, head of the Tsinghua University architecture department, also notes that there is too much attention on "the form" rather than "the spirit." In other words, the current practice of rebuilding places falls into the trap of mimicking the appearance of the past without capturing its essence.
To rebuild a place is not only about constructing a shell, but more importantly, about creating its content. The content of a rebuilt place should be memory and experience. To rebuild a place is to learn its stories and to tell new stories based on the old. The first step is to listen to the stories of the community and imagine the place from their perspective. This way, the rebuilt place will have a deeper sense of belonging and meaning for the community.
Unsuccessful Place Rebuilding
Media of Storytelling:
Constructing Or Deconstructing Place?
An Overview of Media
A Storytelling Test in Kennedy Plaza
Site Analysis
Kennedy Plaza Timeline
Kennedy Plaza Development Mapping
Story Collecting
Based on the analysis, I began collecting stories about Kennedy Plaza by reading newspapers and journals from the years when major changes happened, as well as interviewing people on the plaza. My goal was to discover the relationships behind this cluster of stories and think about how they could be assembled in unity.
The image on the right shows all the stories I collected throughout the history of Kennedy Plaza. Each line represents a person. By abstracting the themes and keywords, two pairs of conflicts can be observed: nature preservation vs. urban development, which has existed since its establishment, and recreational space vs. transportation hub, which is one of the biggest problems Kennedy Plaza is facing currently.
Story Visualization
Because most stories I collected are in words, I needed to figure out a way to visualize and build them in a virtual environment. I selected four representative people from each theme to focus on. In the storyboards, I combine keyframe drawings and diagrams together to gain a better understanding of space and the activities there. These storyboards serve both as a preparation of virtual reality interpretation and as a traditional way of storytelling.
A VR Storytelling Test
After drawing the storyboards, I start to work on the first story, “The Mill Worker”. I built Exchange Place and the cove promenade in the 1860s, and overlay the current condition of Kennedy Plaza as point clouds on top of the 1860 model. In order to tackle the loneliness problem in the pretest, I added virtual people with animations like walking, talking, and taking carriages into the environment.
There are improvements compared to the previous VR pretest, but there are also problems. The point clouds don't work as an indicator as I expected. Users are more interested in the points themselves and do not recognize them as a manifest of the present. Thus, without background knowledge, users have trouble connecting the virtual environment with the present site.
Also, the virtual characters are not convincing enough. Interactions among people are the foundation for lots of the stories because it is not only the physical environment but also what the people do in that environment that affects how a person feels about a place. For stories like “The Street Supervisor”, if the virtual characters don’t work, the stories don’t work. There is no need to rebuild the current Kennedy Plaza in virtual reality since people can visit the real one anytime they want.
A possible solution users suggested is an augmented reality experience because the current physical environment will act as a comparison and there are real people in the experience.
AR Storytelling Envision
STORIES OF THE PAST: HISTORICAL SCENARIO REAPPEARANCE
Experiencing the scenarios is a more intuitive way for people to learn how the city has been changed and why the changes happened, especially when all the changes are presented side by side. For young generations, it’s an attraction to learn the history of the city. Comments and critics from the older generations are supplemental documents except for official records now mostly relied on. They could help refine the details of the scenarios and provide more perspectives to read the development of the city.
HISTORY REAPPEARANCE: THE SUICIDE CIRCLE
By crossing the road by themselves, hopefully, people would understand how people in the 1980s felt about the traffic congestion, and why memorial square was finally torn down.
HISTORY COMPARISON: EXCHANGE PLACE
By comparing the exchange place in the 1860s and 1960s, people would have a sense of how the transportation method in the city affected the space and usage of Kennedy Plaza.
STORIES OF THE PRESENT: LOCATIVE SOCIAL MEDIA
People today are already used to sharing their daily life via social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Instead of hashtagging the stories with “Kennedy Plaza," their stories will be presented on the actual plaza. Once entering the AR platform, one could see all the things that once happened at Kennedy Plaza, and also share what they heard and saw. For the public, locative social media is an archive of the place created on its own. It's a way to ensure their rights to share thoughts and speak out. For landscape architects, it’s a database to learn the place from different perspectives through time.
For the place itself, it’s a way to reactivate the site. Places like Kennedy Plaza are having a hard time now. It usually takes a long time to put a renewal proposal into practice, or the proposal may even be abandoned at last due to certain reasons. Through the process of sharing and commenting, locative media is an innovative way to bring back communication and interactions among people from the Internet to the physical space.
STORIES OF THE FUTURE: TEST AND ENVISION
For the test part, designers could upload their proposals to the platform. Whoever is on site could get a sense of how the designs work spatially, walk through them, feel the phenomenal dynamics like light and shadow, and see the potential activities. For the envisioning part, not only the designers but also the public could do on-site sketches. Through the platform, landscape architects could learn what are the expectations of the public and how the public thinks of their design.
The current public participation process is limited in the time period and sample amount. Usually, we hold an event for several hours, so a lot of the potential targets are not able to participate. With proposals uploaded to the AR platform, people could go through the designs anytime when they visit the site and pre-experience the proposal before its construction.
Platform Comparison
Environment Construction
For an acceptable experience, everything in virtual reality needs to be three-dimensional. Thus, 3D modeling or 360-degree video is the prerequisite of a VR environment. No one expects to see flat pictures and videos in a virtual environment. This asks creators for certain techniques which a regular person might not have. Thus, to use this media, they need to turn to professionals for help.
2D videos and pictures are more acceptable in an augmented reality environment because there is already a physical world as the 3D content. The 2D content could be virtual materials attached to physical surfaces. This requires more approachable techniques, which means anyone could take pictures or shoot videos themselves and upload them to a cloud drive without others’ help or translation.
3D Model Construction
Because virtual reality is purely a simulation, there is no other work to be done after completing 3D modeling and animation. Users just wear a headset to experience the virtual environment.
For a decent augmented reality 3D experience, there is a lot more to do after completing 3D modeling and animation. In order to match the virtual models with the real world, 3D camera tracking needs to be done no matter if it is displayed by a headset or a mobile device. It costs a lot in terms of money, time, and labor force. Even if just for landscape architects, a team needs to be assembled for a project.
NAVIGATION: TRAVEL METHOD
There are multiple ways to travel through the virtual environment. Users can physically walk, as well as teleport, from one location to another. Therefore, they can quickly jump to wherever there are interactions and characters and then go to the next story.
People cannot teleport themselves in an augmented environment. If a story relies on communicating with locales that are long distances to each other, a large part of the experience would be just walking. To ensure a rich experience, stories must be overlaid with one another to fill spatial gaps.
In a virtual reality environment, where users are allowed to travel is flexible. The creator can control where users can and cannot go by setting navigation boundaries. This is a way to ensure users are within the storylines.
Where users can travel in an augmented environment is shaped by the current condition of the site. For instance, users cannot reach where originally was a bridge but is now a waterbody. Reversely, they can stand on solid ground where there was water.
NAVIGATION: ACCESSIBILITY
Virtual reality is usually experienced indoors. Because the system is enclosed, the immersive experience can be enhanced with advanced technologies like spatial audio and smell releasers.
The influence of physical reality cannot be avoided in an augmented experience. One most obvious interference is that what’s already on-site cannot be demolished. For instance, people can never truly feel what it's like without the Superman building at Kennedy Plaza because they cannot see through the building or remove the shadow.
IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE ENHANCEMENT
Storytelling Platform
EXTENSION: TOWARDS AUGMENTED PLACES
Taking individual differences as a starting point, my thesis discusses how emerging media like augmented reality can make landscape design more democratic and diverse. This platform offers the public more roles to play in the design process. That being said, augmented reality is treated as a tool in this thesis. As I was constructing the demos, another question occurred to me: could it also be the content of a landscape?
Will a public space still be public, or become both a public and private space? To put my storytelling platform into practice, an app will be downloaded to people’s augmentation devices. Similarly, to put others’ proposals into practice, other AR apps will also be installed. Then, what people experience in the augmented world depends on which app people use, and different augmentation will shape the physical world differently. As people gather on different platforms based on their interests, there will be hundreds of hybrid public spaces building upon the physical ones. An augmented place could even be personalized, like a personal Google Drive. Like the home-building system in some MMORPGs, people can construct different virtual landscapes with the same template- the physical space. If everyone sees different things through their devices, it’s difficult to say if there are still public spaces anymore.
I imagine augmented reality as a way to get close to design democracy, where the public have more choices and more weight in decision-making. However, in practice, it’s never easy to be equal. Whether government or organization, the platform needs to be operated and maintained by a body with strong execution, management and funding. With certain power comes certain restrictions. Will the operator block some of the sounds for their own benefit? How much capital will be invested into the platform, even resulting in the platform ending up with only advertising? Who has the right and ability to oversee this platform?
These are the remaining questions I have and they might never be answered.