Erik: How does understanding narrative help cities create individual identities?

Bijoy: So narrative is how we communicate, really, at the base level, right? If you think about anything that happens because we kind of exist in this uni-dimensional space-time continuum as far as we can tell. Things seem to happen before, during, and after, or the pledge, and the turn, and the prestige, and the magic trick, act one, act two, act three. If we then go back and say a scene is on a journey and it’s got a story to tell, then yeah, then the things that have happened to the scene, just like, you know, ‘oh man, I went to this thing, this happened.’ The same thing is for the – is to the city. These are the things that happened to the city. When we introduce each other we tell our story. I always introduce myself as this mutt who was, you know, born of a Catholic mother and a Hindu father, did elementary school in India, did middle school in Taiwan, did high school in Hong Kong, that narrative gives people a way to locate me in their lives and vice versa, and then the conversation can proceed from there. So again, by analogy, if we just think of the city as a person, all the things that apply to people now magically apply to the city, right? So the narrative is really, really important, and being able to tell that story is vital because then you can say – well, for example, like ‘you know, how did the music scene happen?’ ‘Oh well, you know, Willie Nelson moved to Austin from Nashville. He wasn’t really happy with Nashville, you know. He was either retiring or not happy with it because they wanted him to be Nashville and he just wanted to be Willie, you know. And the Armadillo World Headquarters happened, and Clifford Ando and all these people came together, and they sort of helping each other, and that’s our music scene came on the map. When you tell that story, I mean that’s a very abbreviated version of the story. But when you tell that story, people immediately go ‘oh, that entity was on a journey.’ And the people and the organizations become just the parts of that story, the contributors to that story. So the storytelling is really important because then it again helps to identify and give the scene its own identity and validity in a sense.