Designing Narrative Environments

The article argues that if urban developers consider only hard factors such as costs, spatial footprint and construction techniques, the results will not necessarily create places that people want to visit or which people will value highly. The efficient construction of large hotels, museums, shopping malls or residential quarters will not necessarily attract people or create a sense of place. In China a massive proliferation of building in recent years that has left us with huge, empty, safe, clean but meaningless spaces that fail to reflect the specificity of the location and in addition fail to resonate in any meaningful way with either citizens or consumers. The article explains how the design of narrative environments offers principles and methodologies to capture and integrate experiential factors, in other words, emotional, intellectual and sensory human responses with the hard logistics of place making.