Urban youth, narrative dialogues, and emotional imprints: How co-creating the 'splotting' methodology became a transformative journey into interdisciplinary collaboration

What is important to urban youth in their everyday lives? How can we find out without alienating them and their everyday experiences of temporal belonging in urban spaces? How can urban planning processes include their perspectives, embodied knowledge and experiences, when designing public spaces? This chapter is an explorative venture of a social anthropologist and a landscape architect in their ongoing quest on finding common ground through inventing and reflecting upon a mode of inquiry called 'splotting'. A challenging interaction with urban youth of minority background in an inner-city area in Oslo, Norway, became the catalyst for critical self-assessment, co-creation and reflection on taken for granted positions within their own fields. Repeated testing of the method over years on numerous groups of urban youth and students in landscape architecture, have led to inter-disciplinary insights on how narrative dialogue enabled by visualization leaves an emotional imprint on future designers and planners of urban spaces. The authors argue that rather than being a tool that transfer knowledge from the user directly into the design of urban spaces, the method has potential to create a dialog and leave imprints to better understand temporary belonging and as such influence future design processes.