Planning with Stories and Dreams Project
We believe in telling stories and sharing dreams as a practice to keep ourselves human. "Planning with Stories and Dreams" is a pilot project bringing together the concrete-sequential world of planning and the more abstract-evocative world of stories and dreams. In simple terms, stories are true and emotional expressions of lived experiences and histories. Dreams are true and emotional expressions of our deepest wishes and longings. We focus on those stories that are always present yet too easy to ignore. We focus on those dreams that emerge from sharing space and collective processes. In this light, what is planning? How is planning also an expression of lived history and much longed-for atonement of past wrongs? Could planning with stories and dreams be two halves of the brain, each needing the other for innovation and creative change? This pilot project is an exploration of this question.
An artist team led by MnDOT’s Transportation Equity Fellow and the SMTP team will spend time learning each other’s languages and processes. They will identify themes and ideas from the SMTP that could benefit from creative and artistic expression, in the form of illustration, story, poetry, or other. These items can be used within the SMTP or alongside as reference.
The process will include conversations not only with the SMTP team but also with a group of non-MnDOT community members and MnDOT staff chosen for their experience in diversity and inclusion as well as for their ability to speak plainly with profound common sense, what the artist team calls “auntie and grandma wisdom.” This group will have representation across race, class, gender, and geography. We center the Black and Indigenous communities to address those who have endured the most harm throughout American history, recognizing stolen land and labor, and with awareness that the path to liberation for those communities is the path to liberation for all. These intimate conversations (not held in person due to the pandemic) will provide material and guidance for the creative and artistic expression. The conversations will relate to themes that have emerged from the last two years of the Transportation Equity Fellow’s time with MnDOT: freedom of movement, relationship to land, and people-centered practice.
Goals
- Create a pilot and example project of alternate ways of understanding planning and communicating planning ideas
- Create art to help re-hear past stories and imagine new futures, based on deep listening, true sharing, healing, and equity
- Support the SMTP team to tell human stories and dreams about transportation
- Support MnDOT in experiencing body-, culture-, and land-based ways of knowledge in hopes of change at a root level.