Ethical awareness in advocacy planning research

Nowadays a significant number of scholars are investigating the important relationship between story and planning, critically scrutinising the socalled ‘story turn’ in planning theory (Forester 1989; Mandelbaum 1991; Eckstein and Throgmorton 2003; Sandercock 2003). They highlight how planning is performed through stories, how rhetoric and poetics become crucial in interactive processes, how the communicative dimension is central to planning practices, how a story can awaken energies and imaginations, becoming a catalyst for an involving urban conversation. Based on a Vancouver based research project this paper aims at exploring its methodological issues and the ethical reflection developed during the research project itself