Reading and writing urban myths

Abstract

Throughout humanity, we have told each other stories to explain the world around us. Stories of myths, folklore and legends, used to connect us with our physical environment, their objects, events and processes. Nowadays we mostly use scientific stories to explore our landscape.

In landscape architecture we also use scientific stories to justify our designs. But even though these stories prove an urgency and credibility for our interventions in the landscape, they sometimes have difficulty connecting with people. Kagan, et al. (2019) argues that a more imaginary approach to narrative, instead of purely scientific, would help people connect to these stories.
In this graduation project this question is explored in the city of Delft in the Netherlands through the narrative approach of myths. The three most important spatial stories in Delft are dissected using the narrative realms as posed by Potteiger and Purinton (1998). These stories are then transformed into the imaginary narrative of myths. These stories are: The story of Delft and the water. The industrial story of Delft and the royal Yeast factory. The ecological story of the urban forests and nature in Delft. These myths formed the basis for an exploration into the landscape and their design.

I found that narrative realms allowed for an approachable method of reading and writing stories in the landscape. Understanding how the story and its parts are interacting in the landscape is crucial for us as designers, because this allows us to know exactly where and what we can change of the stories in the landscape.
The imaginary narrative of myths simplifies and abstracts the elements of the story to their most essential form while still respecting the technical depth behind them. I think that myths offer great potential to be a way of communicating complex stories and meaning to the common layman.