Narrative City: Latin American Home-City Landscapes in Halifax, Nova Scotia
Date
2023-08-22
Authors
Moncayo-Adams, Manuel Cyrus
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Abstract
Storytelling lies at the center of cultural production and exchange. In smaller immigrant
communities without dedicated cultural infrastructure and established networks of
gathering spaces, oral storytelling functions as the dominant medium for the formation of
‘home-spaces’ in the city. Three conversations with established Latin American immigrants
in Halifax, Nova Scotia explore ‘home’ across domestic, public, and commercial space.
Using the oral chronotype, mapping, collage and spatialization translate time and space
across digital infrastructures, the built environment, and oral narratives into speculative
design proposals grounded in the storied and subtle imaginary. Storytelling is imagined as
a subversive design practice, bringing forth liminal histories of the city to provide alternative
contextual readings of place, materiality, and human behaviour.
Description
Narrative City presents a speculative design methodology for grounded in community-based oral storytelling, cognitive mapping, and collage-representation. This methodology is shown to identify spatial patterns that can be used to generate an architecture that integrates cultural patterns into the built landscape. The product of this work is a speculative design proposal and an academic methodology to contribute to critical community engagement through design in architectural teaching and practice.
Keywords
Architecture, Interdisciplinary Design Studies, Diaspora, Immigration, Latin America, Canada, Nova Scotia, Landscape, Speculative Design, Oral Culture, Storytelling, Narrative, Methodology