Inventing the Greatest: Crafting Louisville's Future Out of story and Clay

Abstract

In earlier publications I have argued that planning can be thought of as a form of persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the future. In this article I tell a story about the transformation of Louisville, Kentucky, a city of approximately 700,000 people located in the middle of the United States. The story begins in the early 1950s with a youth named Cassius Marcellus Clay, moves through space and time, weaves together a series of locally grounded common urban narratives, and ends at a new Center in Louisville named after Muhammad Ali. By weaving these tales together, I seek to demonstrate how narrative might be used to generate a more capacious approach to planning, but also to indicate how the physical design of the city-region has to be changed to make space for diverse common urban narratives. I end by suggesting that such an approach might help increase the sustainability of Louisville and other city-regions.

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