Abstract
Video has long served as a research tool across disciplines. In planning, film has shaped urban imaginaries, whether as a form of urban marketing by city authorities or as a mode of resistance. Increasingly, film is used to foster community engagement, but systematic analyses of participatory video (PV) for decolonizing approaches to planning are scarce. This article reviews experiences using film as a PV practice in planning and across disciplines, discussing lessons learned and arguing that when embedded within ethical, reflective frameworks, the moving image can destabilize hierarchies, foster dialogue and mutual learning, and expand epistemic pluralism in planning practice.
Introduction
Decolonizing participatory planning calls for engagement tools that foster cross-cultural dialogue and narrative co-production while providing a rhetorical means of persuasion for underserved communities. In the following, we consider the multiple affordances and challenges of pursuing participatory video (PV) for community engagement, suggesting that the emotional resonance of film makes PV a powerful tool to encourage intimate modes of dialogue based on lived experience. By pursuing an intentional video-based approach to community engagement, PV has the potential to encourage four critical practices central to decolonizing participatory planning—dialogue, collective learning, relationship-building, and reimagining—and thus destabilize uneven structures of power and expand epistemic pluralism (Manuel and Vigar 2021).
Because of the sensory immersion and emotional response generated by video, PV and adjacent methods such as video voice and digital storytelling have inspired underserved communities to consider present conditions, historical paths, and possible futures (Cumming and Norwood 2012; Sandercock and Attili 2010) in ways that are difficult to achieve with traditional, dialogical participatory methods. By challenging hierarchies between external experts and community members, PV invites communities to participate as co-authors of their own visual narratives. In Indigenous communities and other communities characterized by epistemologies based on storytelling, cinema is uniquely suited to recover narrative sovereignty, to resist colonial framings, and to affirm epistemologies rooted in relational ontologies of land, water, and community. PV also attracts youth participation, allowing young people to express their realities, elaborate on their desires, and intervene in public discourses that directly affect their futures.
However, to make PV a powerful resource for decolonizing approaches to participatory planning, it is necessary to consider the innate limitations of advanced technologies in participatory planning processes, recognizing that decisions about lenses, framing, editing, and narrative are political choices shaped by epistemological commitments. Technical training required to ensure effective participation by community members may be limited by time, space, and resource constraints. Community capacity to participate effectively in the editing process is often limited. Such technical limitations may lead to video narratives that fail to represent the depth and diversity of community voices and instead reproduce storylines that reflect elite priorities. As in the case of other community engagement approaches that draw on digital technologies such as participatory mapping and geographic information system, access to PV-based participatory processes is contingent on community relations of power and attitudes toward recordings of moving images. The video equipment and recording processes in themselves may also discourage participation of some community members and serve to exclude marginalized residents from dialogue and narrative co-production.
While video has recently emerged as a productive tool for community engagement, the use of cinema in urban planning is not new. From post-war urban renewal documentaries to contemporary city branding campaigns, moving images have been used to project visions of modernity and mobilize support for hegemonic development agendas. At the same time, by privileging some places, voices, and visions, they make others invisible, reinforcing hierarchies and reducing the scope of acceptable urban imaginaries (Muslimah and Keumala 2018; Raento, Leino and Laine 2021). On the other hand, marginalized groups and their allies have found in cinema a way to build counter-narratives that show lived experiences, create alternative visions, and reveal socio-spatial inequalities (Chatterjee et al. 2022; Cumming and Norwood 2012).
The representational authority of cinema lies in its unique power to transform perceptions and awaken the senses, deepening our understanding of the city by revealing layers of memory, desire, and contradiction (Staessen and Boelens 2023). Through visual symbolism, narrative rhythms, and sensory immersion, moving images can create emotional responses that are difficult to achieve with written or spoken words, creating deeper and more empathetic connections with urban issues (Staessen and Boelens 2023). Penz and Lu (2011) argue that film brings audiences closer to the “soft city,” a territory where the invisible, emotional, and dynamic aspects of urban life come into view. Visual narratives present the city as a setting woven from multiple memories, sensibilities, and possibilities in constant transformation (Staessen and Boelens 2023).
The layering of narrative, image, and sound in film produces a dense architecture of meaning, positioning cinema as a site where the politics of representation are continuously negotiated in relation to difference, proximity, and power (Ginsburg 1991; Nichols 1991; Trinh 1990a). Attention to these relations of power does not diminish the aesthetic or relational dimensions of cinema; rather, such awareness deepens the potential for an ethical and situated engagement with film as both practice and method. Trinh (1991) views cinema as a tool for attentive listening, shared inquiry, and collaborative production of knowledge that may inform policy and practice. Approaching film in this way draws attention to which stories are told and whose voices are heard in the making and sharing of film.
As frequent users of video in our own research, we have a shared belief in the value of this arts-based method for a decolonizing planning practice. Our discussion here is informed by the first author's collaborations with Indigenous communities in the urban Brazilian Amazon, engaging with questions of environmental justice, water governance, and self-determination; the second author's video documentation of Indigenous cartographies and community development in Latin America; and the third author's video work exploring how decision-makers engage with the lived knowledge and everyday practices of East African immigrant communities. At the same time, we also share concerns over the ethical and representational challenges associated with these technologies. As we have pursued our own PV work, we have noted a lack of texts that systematically analyze best practices of relevance to participatory approaches to community-based planning. To further explore the potentials and pitfalls of PV for a decolonizing planning practice, we therefore set out to review scholarly literature in the planning field as well as in film studies, Indigenous studies, community development, and critical development studies.
In so doing, we have included both texts where authors explicitly identify their work as PV and authors who position their work as one of many adjacent, video-based methods. Our goal here has been to develop a critical survey of video applications of relevance to participatory planning by synthesizing lessons from authors who have used video in their community-engaged work. Rather than attempting to construct a common definition based on method by delineating certain ways in which PV has been deployed in planning processes and excluding others, we have approached our analysis from the perspective of intentionality with an eye toward lessons for community-engaged planning. By leveraging the emotionality of the moving image, intentional uses of video in a variety of fields, using diverse approaches, have demonstrated the potential of video to foster dialogue, collective learning, relationship-building, and reimagining while illuminating important pitfalls and considerations. For ease of reading and to encompass this broader definition of video applications for community engagement, we have used the abbreviation “PV” throughout. However, when necessary for analytical clarity and comparison between cases, we have identified which authors use the term PV and who deploy adjacent terms.
We began by searching for articles that discuss PV in the planning field, identified by the appearance of keywords related to urban planning in the abstract. This phase of our search confirmed our initial assumption: PV has received relatively little scholarly attention in the planning field despite the wide use of such methods in community-based development and adjacent work. In all, we found six articles that examined participatory uses of video in the planning literature, appearing in Planning Theory & Practice, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Landscape and Urban Planning, The Geographical Journal, and Urban Analytics and City Science. Importantly, only one of these articles explicitly uses the term “Participatory Video” (Fisher et al. 2021). The remaining studies employ a range of related terms to describe participatory uses of film, including collaborative filmmaking and film as action research (Sandercock and Attili 2010, 2014), Community Voice Method (CVM) (Cumming and Norwood 2012), participatory filmmaking (Manuel and Vigar 2021), and site-specific video (Lundman 2016). While conceptually distinct, all these approaches mobilize video as a participatory method embedded in planning processes.
We then broadened our search to develop a better understanding of discussions around cinema in the planning literature more broadly. Using the key terms such as “film and planning,” “video and urban planning,” and “cinema and city,” our search resulted in 39 articles addressing themes such as video and behavioral prediction in the city, the urban development process, tourism, and the role of video in planning education. Following this, we broadened our search to encompass participatory uses of video in other scholarly fields, using the search terms participatory video, participatory film, ethnographic video, digital storytelling, collaborative filmmaking, and community video, resulting in 47 publications. We limited our close reading of these articles to those that included case studies, allowing us to tease out principal lessons from practical applications of PV. In cases where the case studies elaborated on challenges experienced by the authors and other participants, we have made sure to discuss these, to the extent possible, given page limitations. Based on the principal lessons derived from the PV literature and our own experience with PV, we then searched for relevant scholarship in film studies to contextualize and elaborate on these lessons. This review of film studies led to a section that examines the psychological impact of film and the political and representational considerations concerning cinematic technology.
In the following tables, we summarize the results of this review, including only the articles selected for our close reading. Table 1 presents how PV has been applied in areas of knowledge that intersect with planning and are most closely related to our work. Table 2 organizes the studies identified in the urban planning literature into thematic categories, ordered from highest to lowest number of publications.
Applications of Participatory Video (PV) Across Fields.
Applications of Film and Video in Planning Literature by Category.
Our discussion here proceeds as follows. In the section “Filmmaking and the Politics of Representation,” we engage with literature from film studies, cultural studies, and visual anthropology to examine how technical choices regarding lenses, composition, and editing shape narratives and mediate power. In the section “Uses of Film to Create Planning Imaginaries,” we examine traditional uses of cinema in urban planning both in terms of supporting hegemonic visions and in creating alternative urban imaginaries. We then provide a synthesis of PV in fields outside planning in the section “How PV Has Been Used in Fields Outside Planning,” where we also discuss the range of definitions and conceptualizations of PV in different fields. This is followed by a review of emerging PV approaches in planning in the section “Cinema in Participatory Planning,” where we critically examine the motivations, benefits, and pitfalls of PV methods. We conclude with a discussion of strategies to center PV as a decolonizing practice to foster dialogue, learning, relationship-building, and reimagining in community-engaged planning.
Filmmaking and the Politics of Representation
Since its inception, filmmaking has been a space of negotiation between creativity and control, voice and erasure, representation and propaganda (Ginsburg 1991; Nichols 1991; Rony 1996). The script, the camera, and the editing table are not merely technical tools; behind every frame there is a choice that carries epistemological, social, and political weight (Trinh 1990b). Cinema thus operates within structures of power and is shaped by historical, institutional, and affective entanglements.
Bringing these aspects to light is an invitation to dwell in the tensions of cinema itself. If it can illuminate, it can also obscure (Nichols 1991; Trinh 1990a). If it can listen, it can also be silent. From the first draft to the final cut, what becomes visible and what is left out reflects creative intuition but also historical legacies, aesthetic regimes, and institutional constraints (Ginsburg 1991; Rony 1996). The initial script functions as narrative governance, blending authorial intention with strategies of audience manipulation (Murtagh, Ganz, and McKie 2009; Nichols 1994; Trinh 1990b). From the outset, a script encodes expectations, dictates rhythm, and shapes what will become visible or remain hidden, operating as an epistemological device that privileges certain perspectives and worldviews while marginalizing others (Nichols 1994; Trinh 1990b). During the filming process, the choices of lenses, angles, and composition shape viewer responses. As pointed out by several scholars (Nichols 1994; Rony 1996; Trinh 1990a), even in ethnographic cinema, these visual strategies turn racialized bodies into spectacle and transform cultural differences into something consumable (Ginsburg 1991).
These visual regimes set the stage for the filmmaker's most decisive assertion of authority: editing. Sergei Eisenstein saw montage as an ideological act where meaning emerges from the tension and contradiction between images (Eisenstein 1949). In one of his most famous phrases, he said that “montage is conflict” (Eisenstein 1949, 49). That means that the cut becomes a dialectical tool that shapes meaning and audience perception by structuring time, compressing space, and creating rhythm through the strategic juxtaposition of images throughout the editing process (Eisenstein 1949). It is at this stage that the filmmaker builds the narrative's architecture and decides how to orchestrate the emotional and temporal flow of the story (Russell 2009).
The filmmaker's authority derives from the emotional intensity generated by the rhythms, movements, sounds, and colors of the moving image (Massumi 2002, 26–27). Ahmed argues that cinema is not merely a mechanism of storytelling but a stage for the exchange of the emotional economies that shape our collective life (Ahmed 2004, 45). Psychoanalytic film theory draws on the concepts of desire, fantasy, and identification to analyze the emotional and psychological responses of the audience. Mulvey (1975, 11) argues that Hollywood cinema curates visual pleasure around the male gaze, positioning viewers to identify with male protagonists while objectifying female characters (Mulvey 1975, 12). Alongside the imagery, sound, particularly voice, silence, and diegetic audio, also have the power to shape viewers’ emotional and psychological engagement by generating intimacy or tension (Silverman 1988).
The field of semiotics examines how visual signs generate meaning and emotional impact, with Barthes highlighting the distinction between denotation (literal meaning) and connotation (cultural and emotional meaning) in his work Image-Music-Text (Barthes 1977, 32–36). Film provides symbolic meanings by conjuring emotional understanding of cross-cultural lived experiences (MacDougall 1998, 203), exemplified by indigenous filmmaking as a medium that transcends aesthetics by serving as an archival record of acts of cultural survival, resistance, and testimony (Ginsburg 1994, 378). However, viewers’ interpretation of signs depends on their knowledge, cultural background, and positionality (Ruby 2000, 154–156, 186), leading to culturally specific emotional responses to filmic imagery (Eco 1976, 73; Wollen 1969, 42).
Uses of Film to Create Planning Imaginaries
The moving image thus has the potential to reinforce dominant narratives but also create space for alternative and resistant perspectives, and in so doing, shape the very imaginaries that define cities. Within the Creative Cities movement, films have long played a strategic role in producing urban desires and collective aspirations (Chen and Shih 2019). Films are often carefully crafted to highlight urban vitality and spectacle while relegating conflict and structural inequalities to the margins of urban life (Alsayyad 2000). Aubry, Blein and Vivant (2015) demonstrate that urban branding strategies are mobilized to reconfigure territories and attract investment in ways that privilege global competitiveness over local complexity. For example, in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, city officials selected and promoted cinematic images that highlighted vitality and safety while deliberately marginalizing depictions of poverty, protest, and decline (Clutter 2009). Through meticulous editing, sound, and narrative structure, film has been used to construct emotionally charged images of urban space, packing everyday environments into compelling narratives that invite viewers to see and feel the city in particular ways (Staessen and Boelens 2023).
However, cinema's potential goes beyond constructing idealized visions or reinforcing dominant images of the city. Based on her analysis of Irena Vrkljan's films of 1960s West Berlin, Bowie (2022) argues that cinema can bring inequalities, public concerns, and gestures of resistance to light, thus serving as symbolic territory where affective bonds and shared expectations around urban life are forged (Rowley 2015). The rise of new technologies, from gamified platforms to videos captured on cell phones, has provided new ways for historically marginalized groups to share their experiences (Evans-Cowley 2010; Fox et al. 2022), making documentary an active force in urban activism (Bathla and Papanicolaou 2022). Works such as “There Goes Our Neighborhood” (Chatterjee et al. 2022) and the sensitive portraits of housing struggles by Martínez and Gil (2022) reveal how cinema mobilizes affections and solidarity. Ultimately, cinema does more than simply reflect the city: it also has the power to frame, mediate, and even reinterpret it (Penz and Lu 2011; Staessen and Boelens 2023). Because of the contradictory power of the moving images, the use of PV in planning means entering a symbolic and emotional terrain where the meaning of urban life itself is always under negotiation.
How PV Has Been Used in Fields Outside Planning
Situating PV
Most commonly pursued within the context of community-based research (CBR), including participatory action research (PAR) and community-based participatory action research (CBPAR), PV is typically seen as a means to elicit endogenous storytelling and document, analyze, and address issues of concern through various forms of community-based action plans and outreach and communication strategies (e.g., Anderson 1988; Green et al. 2020; Gregory et al. 2006; Tremblay and de Oliveira Jayme 2015; Tremblay and Harris 2018). Although more recently gaining notice in academia, PV has a long history in community-engaged research: one of the first PV projects took place on Fogo Island of Newfoundland as early as the late 1960s (Crocker 2003; Mosher 2012). PV is often understood as an arts-based method (De Jager et al. 2017) used to encourage participation by youth and other community members who might feel excluded from traditional research approaches. Scholars pursuing PV are often inspired by decolonizing research principles, seeing in PV a potential to challenge the hierarchies between researchers and participants, create spaces for transdisciplinary learning and critical analysis, and honor community priorities and knowledges through reciprocity and sharing (e.g., Lobo and Barry 2019; McGinnis 2018; Smith 2012).
PV has become a particularly popular method for participatory research in fields concerned with human health, including research with immigrants of youth to elicit first-hand perspectives on displacement (McGinnis 2018; Schensul and Dalglish 2015), to foster intergenerational learning (Silver and Lee 2023), and to improve the conditions of socioeconomically disadvantaged populations (Maguire 1987; Minkler and Wallerstein 2003; O’Fallon and Dearry 2002). PV with underrepresented populations often draws on feminist theory as it seeks to foster girls’ and women's agency (see, e.g., Singh et al. 2017) and enhance co-production among refugee populations and other marginalized groups (see, e.g., Sarria-Sanz, Alencar and Verhoeven 2024). PV is also used in natural resource management (Baker and Kusel 2003; Wilmsen et al. 2008 in Green et al. 2020; Magallanes-Blanco 2015; Rodriguez and Inturias 2016; Tremblay and Harris 2018) and community development based on traditional knowledge and values (Mosher 2012; Richardson 2022; Richardson-Ngwenya et al. 2019).
Conceptualizing and Defining PV
Because PV is situated in different fields and variously framed as a method for community-based action, arts-based learning and dialogue, or a decolonizing research method, a variety of working definitions and terminologies have emerged. The most commonly used term for such collaborative filmmaking is “Participatory Video,” typically understood to involve the use of video to encourage community engagement in research and development processes, foster dialogue to address community issues, and leverage community agency to present claims or proposals to external authorities. The authors in our review who explicitly use the term “Participatory Video” as the broader term to refer to their work are Buire (2022), Green et al. (2020), Rodriguez and Inturias (2016), Lobo and Barry (2019), Magallanes-Blanco (2015), Mosher (2012), Richardson (2022), Richardson-Ngwenya et al. (2019), Singh et al. (2017), Sarria-Sanz, Alencar and Verhoeven (2024), Tremblay and de Oliveira Jayme (2015), and Tremblay and Harris (2018).
A related concept, “collective documentary film-making,” emphasizes the negotiations, impromptu decision-making, and unexpected turns during the development of PV. In her work with political youth organizations in Angola (Buire 2022), the author noted that the documentary process led to different video products than initially expected, thus revealing the agency of community-based filmmakers. Conversely, the concept of “participatory video proposal” reflects a more tightly controlled video production process designed for targeted communication to external actors (Richardson-Ngwenya et al. 2019).
Another school of thought conceives of PV as a “Community Voice Method” (Green et al. 2020), where community video “voices” emerge through more traditional methods with external scholars serving as videographers. This approach contrasts with another approach referred to as “Video Voice” (Storm-Mathisen 2018), whereby community members themselves conduct interviews and other video recordings of community life and places, and, once the recordings are completed, work jointly with external collaborators to produce the film. Yet another related strategy is “Digital Storytelling (DST).” In this multimedia approach, video constitutes one of several visual technologies used to provide members of underserved communities a platform to make their voices heard (Silver and Lee 2023). DST combines images (still and moving), sound, music, text, and narration to develop more experimental representations of lived experiences (Lambert 2010). Another innovative use of PV is “Improvisational Film” (Schensul and Dalglish 2015), which, as the name suggests, involves participants performing for the camera. Working with the Teen Action Research Project (TARP), a five-year program funded by the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, in Hartford, Connecticut, the authors drew on principles of critical performance ethnography (Denzin 2003) and Boal's (1992) conceptualization of Theater of the Oppressed to engage youth in the development of scripts and recordings of their own performances.
The Improvisational Film approach illuminates the central importance of visual sovereignty in PV (Smith 2012). This concept has particular relevance for Indigenous Video, which can be understood as its own medium that incorporates varying degrees of community control while not necessarily being oriented toward an action research goal. Because of the breadth of the field and its wide application and long history, the field of Indigenous Video merits its own literature review and falls beyond the scope of this study. As Indigenous Video is informed by the principle of visual sovereignty, Indigenous Video is typically viewed as intrinsic to the Indigenous struggle for territoriality, human rights, political representation, and more broadly, the visibilization of Indigenous culture, lifeways, and epistemological and social justice (e.g., Gleghorn 2013; Iseke and Moore 2011; Smith 2012). The term “Participatory Video” was not found in this scoping of the literature of Indigenous Video, reflecting the predominant view of video in this field as a tool of self-determination that should remain squarely in the hands of Indigenous filmmakers.
Participation and Control of the Video Process
PV typically begins with a collective process of problem identification and goal setting between researchers and community members. Community representatives and researchers deliberate and define the division of roles and responsibilities of participants in the video production process, with the understanding that the video work will evolve and that the videos will be subject to various forms of community review and subsequent revisions by local filmmakers. The early planning process also typically involves a training phase where residents are instructed in the use of video technology, including storyboarding and project planning, the use of video recording equipment, and the use of editing software. Authors report training programs that range from one to two days to several weeks, depending on the previous skills of participants and their availability, the funding available for the project, and the goals of the overarching project, especially the extent to which video is intended to support endogenous storytelling more broadly or further a well-defined action goal.
In visual research more broadly (i.e., Banks 2001; Pink 2013), a differentiation is often made between photo/video voice (where participants are taught to use image-making technologies) and photo/video elicitation (where participants are primarily engaged in interpretations of visual material) (Storm-Mathisen 2018). Depending on where projects fall on the continuum of community control, community members will have a range of influence and opportunity to participate in the video voice and video elicitation phases of the project. In general, projects that prioritize storytelling tend to demonstrate greater control of the video work by community members, often necessitating more extensive and time-consuming training, while more narrowly defined action projects tend to involve external researchers and videographers more deeply in the documentation, analysis, and editing process.
The actual video documentation and recording of interviews and community meetings is followed by a collective analysis to select footage and then edit it into videos of varying lengths. Again, the analysis of the footage falls on a continuum from more to less participatory, with the most participatory projects involving a series of viewings by different community groups where original footage is slowly reduced to a final series of clips through an exhaustive, deliberative process. Finally, the resulting films are typically shown to audiences internally in communities to elicit dialogue and reflection, often in connection with the development of communicative strategies to external authorities. Following such collective deliberation, the videos are disseminated through various means to outside communities, often through a combination of virtual platforms such as YouTube and targeted showings in face-to-face meetings with external authorities.
The level of community control of the planning, recording, analysis, and editing process thus falls on a continuum from nearly full control by community members, as in Indigenous Video produced by Indigenous organizations, to a process where researchers, videographers, and other external project partners play key roles in all phases of the work. The level of “participation” is typically assumed to be greater when the PV process is directed by a locally constituted collective (Gleghorn 2013; Salazar 2009). However, by measuring the level of participation by the level of control by a traditional, local organization, we elide the potential agency of local artists (Buire 2022; Schensul and Dalglish 2015) to shape the video product. Because of this conundrum, Menzies (2015) suggests that the most productive distinction may be between “community video” and “traditional narrative documentary,” in the sense that community video involves community participation while traditional narrative documentary is used by researchers to document what is not easily preserved in fieldnotes (see also Banks 2001; Pink 2013).
Benefits and Challenges of Participatory Video
Benefits to Researchers
Because of its ability to elicit impromptu and less guarded reflections on the part of community members, PV may provide researchers with a deeper understanding of everyday practices and opportunities to engage in collective learning (Storm-Mathisen 2018; Tremblay and Harris 2018). This, in turn, serves to transgress boundaries in the research process and strengthen researchers’ connections with local research participants and community members (Lobo and Barry 2019). Furthering more symmetrical relations between communities and the researcher leads to greater empathy, thus strengthening researchers’ ability to more deeply grasp community realities and desires (Storm-Mathisen 2018).
Benefits to Individual Community Members
PV potentially allows individual participants to tell their own story on their own terms, especially community members whose voices are typically not heard (McGinnis 2018; Schensul and Dalglish 2015). Video-based storytelling has the potential to enhance a sense of self and foster self-reflexivity among participants (Buire 2022; De Jager et al. 2017; Tremblay and de Oliveira Jayme 2015; Tremblay and Harris 2018), which in turn builds self-confidence and leadership capacities while providing community members with education, training, and professional skills. This can benefit communities by developing a cadre of communicators who can more effectively engage with external agents to support community perspectives and needs. (De Jager et al. 2017; Singh et al. 2017; Tremblay and de Oliveira Jayme 2015; Tremblay and Harris 2018)
Benefits to Communities
PV can play a significant role in capturing norms and generational knowledge that govern relations with nature, principles and strategies of environmental management methods, and historical practices and values intrinsic to the preservation of cultural heritage (De Jager et al. 2017; Green et al. 2020; Magallanes-Blanco 2015; Rodriguez and Inturias 2016; Tremblay and de Oliveira Jayme 2015). Because of the power of video to prompt critical dialogue as well as empathy, PV can serve to identify knowledge and process gaps that reproduce inequities and uneven relations of power with external actors, translating technical language into terms accessible to and actionable by community members. Ultimately, because of the greater visual sovereignty accrued to communities through their own leadership of the video documentation, editing, and distribution process, PV has enabled communities to present their cultural heritage and political claims in more effective ways while inspiring more effective, just, and sustainable development strategies through co-productive frameworks.
Limitations and Potential Risks of Participatory Video
Authors in this field are also cognizant of the possible risks and limitations of PV. While all projects reviewed here included a training phase, such training is always limited by the availability of time, space, and resources (Lobo and Barry 2019). This uneven access to the video production process may reproduce rather than challenge hierarchies between external scholars and professionals and members of the community (Sarria-Sanz, Alencar and Verhoeven 2024). Furthermore, the ability to influence PV projects may be severely limited by oppressive community structures, particularly in communities shaped by rigid gender structures and other intersectional relations of power (Singh et al. 2017). Community structures that reproduce disempowering hierarchies require PV practitioners to adopt an attitude of flexibility and adaptability, embracing ambiguities and accepting unexpected outcomes. Authors in this field are also concerned with the long-term impacts of PV, emphasizing the need for effective strategies to follow up on planning and development strategies once the videos are completed (Tremblay and Harris 2018).
Cinema in Participatory Planning
Because of the ability of PV to give voice to marginalized communities, foster authentic dialogue, and engage deeply with the concrete and emotional experiences of those affected by urban interventions, PV emerges as a potentially powerful tool for more inclusive, empathetic, and culturally attuned approaches to planning. Planning scholars contribute useful and nuanced understandings of the concept of participation to the field, particularly by drawing on the conceptualization of PV as a storytelling medium with the potential to foster critical dialogue and innovative problem-solving. While not all the cases we analyze in this section explicitly use the term “Participatory Video,” the authors engage video as a participatory method embedded within planning processes. As such, we treat PV as an analytical category that encompasses a series of closely related practices, including collaborative filmmaking, film as action research, and other participatory uses of audiovisual storytelling in planning.
Participatory filmmaking in planning means that community members are actively involved in shaping both the visuals and the story (Cumming and Norwood 2012; Fisher et al. 2021; Sandercock and Attili 2010). For this reason, many argue that PV prompts a rethinking of the traditional relationships between planners, researchers, and community members (Manuel and Vigar 2021; Sandercock and Attili 2010). PV may transform an extractive or top-down consultation model into a democratic practice of storytelling, capable of expanding narratives and revealing emotions that traditional tools are often incapable of reaching (Cumming and Norwood 2012; Fisher et al. 2021; Lundman 2016; Manuel and Vigar 2021). Unlike surveys, workshops, or town hall meetings, participatory uses of video enable participants to communicate experiential, affective, and embodied dimensions of place, capturing emotions, rhythms, and everyday practices that are often flattened or excluded in more conventional participatory formats. Our review of cases from distinct geographical locations, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Finland, and Guyana, illuminates the way local contexts and modes of participation shape how video is incorporated into planning processes, as it serves as a tool for accessing, understanding, and making visible local realities and needs. In turn, this integration influences the organization of deliberation, the forms of knowledge that circulate, and the roles that planners, participants, and other mediators assume in the production and dissemination of knowledge (see Cumming and Norwood 2012; Fisher et al. 2021; Manuel and Vigar 2021).
One such mode of participatory practice is exemplified by the CVM (Cumming and Norwood 2012), a deliberative process based on in-depth interviews with local residents conducted in partnership with community members. By opening public meetings with a sensitive and multivocal film that presents the contradictions and concerns of the community in their own words film rather than technical presentations, CVM changes the tone of engagement, transforming what might otherwise be environments of dispute and antagonism into spaces of attentive listening and mutual recognition (Cumming and Norwood 2012). The authors also acknowledge important limits to this approach, noting that facilitation and control over editing decisions shape how facilitators and project teams frame community narratives, at times privileging certain voices and tensions over others, while the use of film can also raise expectations of institutional change that planning processes are not always able to meet (Cumming and Norwood 2012).
Manuel and Vigar (2021) further explore the transformative potential of PV, highlighting its role in both broadening the participatory repertoire and enabling new forms of knowledge production in urban contexts. In the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed in England, the introduction of PV through the Bootlegger app allowed groups who are often overlooked in planning processes, especially young people, musicians, and cyclists, to engage in the neighborhood planning debate. Video production, from storyboarding to editing, required collective reflection and negotiation, fostering mutual learning and opening space for these new voices. Through the PV process, participants identified gaps in representation, such as the absence of spaces for young people, and were also encouraged to reflect on the limits of more conventional participatory methods (Manuel and Vigar 2021). At the same time, the authors recognize the risks and limitations of PV, which include uneven control over storytelling, editing choices that may override community intentions, and the possibility that PV outputs will be selectively mobilized, or ignored, within institutional planning settings. As the authors argue, unless there are changes in the institutional structures and power relations of planning itself, even the most creative participatory efforts may be absorbed into conventional practices, losing their transformative capacity (Manuel and Vigar 2021).
Film may also serve to mediate local experience through audiovisual language, as evidenced by the project led by Lundman (2016) in Turku, Finland. Unlike direct co-production with residents, this project started with surveys and polls, the responses to which were translated into short narrative films by local artists, dramatizing possible futures for the neighborhood. Further enhancing the performative and situated nature of the intervention, Lundman posted QR codes throughout the neighborhood to allow access to the films in the flow of everyday life. Through this approach, planning ceased to be confined to forums or meetings and became directly inscribed in the sensory experience of the neighborhood (Lundman 2016). This approach, however, involves a different set of trade-offs, as designers and artists mediate residents’ inputs through their interpretive work, raising questions about authorship, narrative authority, and how participation is defined in the absence of direct co-production (Lundman 2016).
Fisher et al. (2021) further elaborate on the potential of PV for the co-production of experiential, sensory, and emotional knowledge through their work with residents engaging with urban green and blue spaces in Guyana. In this project, participants produced short videos documenting how these spaces are used and emotionally experienced in everyday life. The videos were later screened to planners and other institutional actors, allowing these experiential relationships with green and blue spaces to enter deliberative discussions that would otherwise rely primarily on technical or ecological metrics (Fisher et al. 2021). In this way, PV operated as a mediating device, enabling participants to revisit their perceptions and develop a sense of agency while expanding the epistemic register through which planners encountered urban environments.
Fisher et al.'s (2021) work resonates with broader planning scholarship that emphasizes the central role of storytelling in planning processes. For Sandercock (2003), storytelling reintroduces affection, creativity, and multiplicity into the practice of planning by challenging hegemonic narratives and breaking with the “cold blood” of technical reports. Her collaborations with Giovanni Attili (Sandercock and Attili 2010) illustrate how the moving image reveals itself as a language of its own, capable of interweaving ethnographic investigation, community engagement, and the production of truly situated knowledge.
In their PV project in the Collingwood Neighbourhood House (CNH) in Vancouver, residents were involved throughout the process, from the selection of narratives to the review and editing of the films. Drawing on Iris Young's (1997) idea of “asymmetric reciprocity,” Sandercock and Attili (2010) point out that relationships between researchers and communities are never entirely equal, highlighting two principal ethical challenges of PV in planning practice. The first is the politics of voice, or the question of who is able to speak and who is spoken for, while the second concerns authorship and ownership, specifically who owns the stories that are collected and who benefits from sharing them. For Sandercock and Attili (2010), PV makes it possible for participants to express their own experiences and to negotiate, together, how their voices and narratives will be represented. In this way, storytelling and research become collaborative, negotiated, and responsive processes.
Building on this work, Sandercock and Attili (2014) further demonstrate how participatory filmmaking can extend beyond the moment of production to generate spaces for dialogue, reflection, and collective meaning-making. Through public screenings and facilitated discussions, films such as Finding Our Way reconfigured conventional planning encounters, unsettling entrenched divisions and creating openings for conversations around shame, pain, empathy, and hope. In these settings, film functioned as a relational medium that brought affective and embodied forms of knowledge into planning arenas, contributing to processes of mutual recognition and, in some cases, collective healing (Sandercock and Attili 2014).
Thus, the transformative potential of PV does not reside solely in co-production, but also in its circulation and reception within public and institutional forums. When shown to community audiences and in institutional forums, the film weaves a network of connections between previously isolated universes, creating true “arenas of visibility,” a concept developed by Myerhoff (1988) to describe to describe spaces in which lives and stories become visible and available for mutual recognition. As Fisher et al. (2021) emphasize, PV may foster collective learning and genuine dialogue with decision-makers, enabling local needs, values, and ways of life to be recognized, debated, and incorporated into institutional practices and policies while expanding the inclusion of groups that are generally distanced from urban debate (Manuel and Vigar 2021).
Yet, it is often at the moment of circulation that power asymmetries become particularly apparent. Even when communities play a central role in filming and storytelling, planners, researchers, funders, and partner organizations often shape decisions about montage, translation, dissemination, and institutional uptake (Cumming and Norwood 2012; Manuel and Vigar 2021; Sandercock and Attili 2010). Because of such tensions and asymmetries, PV's potential to deepen and multiply dialogue must be tempered by a strong ethic of political responsibility. In particular, participatory uses of video should invite planners, communities, and institutions to engage in practices of radical listening that welcome dissent and pain rather than solely search for harmonious stories. When audiovisual media incorporate narratives of conflict, resistance, and transformation, it moves the focus toward co-construction of more just, inclusive, and plural forms of coexistence (Sandercock and Attili 2014).
Implications of PV for Decolonizing Planning
Ultimately, cinema is always implicated in structures of power and meaning, whether in its use as an instrument of hegemonic urban branding or in its radical appropriation by communities for resistance and their own narratives. Cinema serves as a territory of contestation and invention, allowing historically silenced voices to reshape the imaginaries and practices of urban planning. Cinema constitutes a space of constant negotiation where ethics, power, memory, and hope are articulated. And yet, what emerges most powerfully from the review of PV in planning and other fields is the realization that, in its most reflective and collective forms, PV can generate spaces of plurality and empathy, destabilize hierarchies, and cultivate new forms of coexistence (Fisher et al. 2021; Smith 2012; Tremblay and de Oliveira Jayme 2015). It is in these provisional and negotiated spaces that the decolonial potential of the moving image is revealed.
At the same time, for this potential to materialize, it is essential to approach PV as a decolonial commitment grounded in the redistribution of representational authority. This entails reconfiguring the grounds on which knowledge is recognized, who is able to narrate these “new stories,” and how such narratives circulate within planning institutions. From this perspective, the promise of PV lies less in producing “better stories” than in confronting epistemic injustice (Ortiz 2022) by unsettling control over framing, editing, and dissemination and by shifting narrative authority to those most affected by planning interventions (Nichols 1991; Sandercock and Attili 2010; Trinh 1991). We do not claim that this shift is either automatic or benign, as PV can reproduce harm through extractive narratives, selective appropriation, and institutional capture (Cumming and Norwood 2012; Manuel and Vigar 2021; Tremblay and Harris 2018). For PV to function as a decolonizing practice, it must therefore be grounded in a situated ethic, attentive to specific local histories, identities, and relations of power, and supported by concrete mechanisms that enable accountability.
In the following, we suggest that by centering the moving image in planning practices, we open the way for (a) more expanded dialogues, (b) reciprocal learning, (c) shared relationships, and, above all, for the (d) reimagination of urban futures based on difference.
Expanded dialogue
From a decolonial perspective, film-mediated dialogue goes beyond the mere exchange of information, transforming into a sensitive yet concrete encounter capable of blurring traditional boundaries between experts and the public. PV projects analyzed in this article demonstrate that moving images carry embodied affections, memories, and knowledge that are difficult to express through words alone (Rodriguez and Inturias 2016; Smith 2012). Through the fissures opened by the camera, historically marginalized voices announce their presence and agency (Fisher et al. 2021), allowing cinematic dialogue to become fertile ground for mutual recognition and authentic appreciation of difference in planning processes.
By convening community members for co-authorship, the very act of filmmaking introduces a shared, productive, and transformative vulnerability (Cumming and Norwood 2012; Sandercock and Attili 2010). The CVM, for example, reveals how the collaborative construction of a film constitutes a political gesture, reframing local debates and legitimizing perspectives and rights that are often silenced. However, it is also clear that these dialogical encounters are always delicate, and therefore the transition from symbolic consultation to effective co-production requires institutions to relinquish narrative control, allowing participants to claim authorship over their stories. It is in this field of negotiation that the politics of representation emerge—who holds the camera, who structures the narrative, and who decides what will be seen and to whom.
Adopting a decolonial approach to PV in planning requires openly confronting such power dynamics and exercising an ethics of “asymmetric reciprocity,” acknowledging the inevitable asymmetries of position and influence even while seeking a more horizontal and pluralistic dialogue (Young 1997; see also Sandercock and Attili 2010). Experiences reported in fields such as public health, environmental conservation, and Indigenous media show that PV projects face challenges ranging from limited technical skills and access to equipment to entrenched hierarchies as well as the constant negotiation of agency and authorship. Fostering critical dialogue through PV is best accomplished when filmmakers, whether planners or participants, critically engage with the inequalities of the context and anchor the PV process in local contexts and knowledge (De Jager et al. 2017; Green et al. 2020; Tremblay and de Oliveira Jayme 2015).
Ultimately, the moving image asserts itself as a vibrant arena of mutual recognition and collective reinvention in the field of urban planning (Fisher et al. 2021; Manuel and Vigar 2021; Sandercock and Attili 2014). The power of PV resides in creating relational encounters that build empathy and trust, mobilizing the senses, emotions, and intellects of viewers (Fisher et al. 2021; Richardson-Ngwenya et al. 2019). PV has the capacity to harbor both constructive conflict and connection. However, sustaining such dialogue in practice requires humility, ethical vigilance, and openness to discomfort and uncertainty.
Reciprocal learning
The PV literature reveals cinema as a fertile ground for pedagogical experimentation. The act of creating and watching a film unfolds as a dialogical encounter where communities and planners challenge each other, reinvent perspectives, and build reciprocal transformations (Fisher et al. 2021; Sandercock and Attili 2010; Tremblay and Harris 2018). PV projects aim to center epistemic justice, challenging traditional hierarchies and deconstructing the privilege attributed to technical, textual, and abstract knowledge. These approaches open space for forms of knowledge that emerge from lived experience, orality, and the networks of affection woven through these encounters. However, this reciprocal learning process is also fraught with uncertainty and discomfort, requiring a willingness to experiment with mistakes, improvise in the face of the unexpected, and listen beyond one's own certainties (Manuel and Vigar 2021; Tremblay and Harris 2018).
It is on this terrain of instability and openness that successful projects find their strength: collaborative editing and collective analysis become moments when negotiations and disagreements provide opportunities for deeper understanding (Manuel and Vigar 2021; Tremblay and Harris 2018). When a cinematic story emerges from concrete, situated practices and resonates beyond the boundaries of a group, PV can act as a platform for healing by creating sensitive spaces where experiences of pain, shame, conflict, and hope can be shared and acknowledged without the expectation of immediate resolution (Richardson-Ngwenya et al. 2019; Sandercock and Attili 2010). Through the flow of encounters and dialogue fostered by PV, cinema becomes a living archive of negotiation that fosters collective learning and creation (De Jager et al. 2017; Tremblay and Harris 2018).
Relationship-building
Our review of the literature suggests that the transformative potential of PV stems in large part from the connections established through shared experiences, collective construction through shared authorship, and joint analysis and collaborative editing. By relinquishing exclusive control of the narrative and sharing editorial power, planners and participants enter a field of continuous negotiation marked by attentive listening, discomfort, and collective creativity. It is not a matter of seeking perfect symmetry, as shared experience is permeated by histories of colonization, exclusion, and contested knowledge (Smith 2012; Young 1997). Instead, it is precisely in navigating these asymmetries that new forms of trust, respect, and solidarity can emerge, opening spaces for the design of more open and inclusive social pacts (Fisher et al. 2021; Sandercock and Attili 2010).
It is in this context of openness and negotiation that the collective practice of filmmaking develops, ranging from initial training to co-editing and iterative feedback and finally public showings and debate. Each participant is invited to transition between multiple roles as narrator, critic, witness, and co-author, which strengthens the plural and dynamic nature of this shared experience (De Jager et al. 2017; Fisher et al. 2021). This transition between places of speaking and listening invites the exercise of responsibility and challenges planners to adopt a humbler and more responsive stance. By revisiting their own professional positions, seeing them reinterpreted through the eyes of others, and debating the meanings of shared urban life, planners and residents collectively outline new horizons of coexistence (Lundman 2016; Sandercock and Attili 2010, 2014). The legacy of PV anchored in decolonial principles lies not only in the final work or in immediate institutional changes, but also in the ways it sows relationships open to difference, reinvention, and mutual care.
Reimagining
Embracing PV as a gesture of world invention also means accepting the unfinished, for the city revealed on screen is always yet to be made. The affective and symbolic power of the moving image resides in its ability to destabilize and inspire, especially when intertwined with collective desires and transformed into a fertile space for shared invention (Bathla and Papanicolaou 2022; Fisher et al. 2021; McGinnis 2018; Sandercock 2022). PV has the capacity to chart pathways to other modes of existence in which dominant narratives are questioned, plural experiences are honored, and wounds can be acknowledged but never erased.
From this perspective, PV ceases to be merely an instrument for documentation or advocacy. It becomes a practice of collective invention, a technology of the imagination that allows communities to mourn, celebrate, hope, and invent other modes of existence (Sandercock and Attili 2010; Tremblay and Harris 2018; Trinh 1991). By becoming a site of reimagination, PV empowers the restitution of silenced histories and allows the emergence of desired future. When communities mobilize cinematic language to narrate their own versions of the urban, they are not simply revisiting the past or denouncing exclusion but inaugurating previously unthinkable grammars of belonging and justice (Iseke and Moore 2011; Sandercock 2022; Schensul and Dalglish 2015; Smith 2012). Ultimately, making PV a central ally of decolonial planning means investing in its power to disrupt and construct. This strategy implies recognizing that cities, like images, always remain open to the future, and that in this shared exercise of reimagination lies the promise of an urban environment that is more just, plural, and sensitive to the stories and aspirations of those who inhabit it.
Conclusion
In this article, we have sought to demonstrate that PV, when reflexively and intentionally integrated into participatory urban planning processes, opens the way for more inclusive dialogues, reciprocal learning, shared relationships, and the collective exercise of imagination. Far beyond illustrating realities or raising audience awareness, cinema emerges as a living practice of negotiation and invention, capable of mobilizing affections, embodying difference, and driving transformations that challenge the limits of traditional planning models.
When adopted as a relational and sensitive practice, PV calls upon planners and communities to share not only knowledge but also presences, gestures, memories, and affections that often escape words. This openness creates the possibility of recognizing and sustaining urban experiences that do not fit into prior diagnoses or linear narratives. More than simply recording or representing, cinema allows the urban to be inhabited in a more plural and embodied way, cultivating spaces of encounter where new alliances, forms of listening, and belonging are built through contact between worlds.
Future research could build on these insights to examine more closely the negotiations involved in PV processes with multiple actors, including planners, institutions, and community actors. Particular attention is also needed to the logistical and ethical challenges that shape these practices, such as access to equipment and training, uneven participation in editing and decision-making, questions of consent and ownership over visual narratives, and the ways in which video outputs are engaged with or overlooked by planning institutions. Taken together, these issues point to critical lines of inquiry to further illuminate the promises and limits of PV within decolonizing planning practice.
Ultimately, centering PV in planning is not simply about experimenting with new methodologies but about embracing an ethical commitment to open-ended processes in which conflict and difference are recognized as sources of creativity and renewal. From this decolonizing perspective, PV contributes to the continual transformation of urban planning practices by fostering attentive listening, collective meaning-making, and shared imagination, reiterating that cinema, more than a technique, is a gesture of care and the ongoing reinvention of the common.
Footnotes
Ethical Approval
There are no human participants in this article, and informed consent is not required.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.