Building Urban Narratives: Collaborative Site-Seeing and Envisioning in the MR Tent

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on studying mixed teams of urban planners, citizens and other stakeholders co-constructing their vision for the future of a site. The MR Tent provides a very specific collaborative setting: an assembly of technologies brought outdoors onto the site of an urban project, which offers vistas onto the site as well as a multiplicity of representations of the site to work with, in different media and taken from different perspectives. The prime focus of this paper is on the complex narratives participants co-constructed in three participatory workshops, with the aim to understand how the core aspects of the MR Tent—spatiality, representation and haptic engagement—shape these narratives. Main findings of this research concern: how the design of the multi-layered space of the MR-Tent supports spatial story-telling; how the different representations of the site of an urban project offer the opportunity to choreograph a ‘site-seeing’ that helps participants understand the site and plan interventions; how the ‘tangibles’ in the MR-Tent encourage a different way of contributing to a shared project and ‘building a vision’.