Year of the Soul of Cities | LCARE Institute & Ecocivilisation 

Storytelling as Civic Repair – Narrative Healing and Reconnection is a Soul of Cities event dedicated to the role of story as a method of healing, reconnection and civic transformation. It explores how collective narratives shape the life of cities and territories: how they preserve memory, transmit trauma, sustain belonging, restore social trust, and open pathways toward more regenerative futures.

At the heart of the event is a profound question: Who gets to tell the story of the city? 

This question is not only cultural or artistic. It is political, ethical, psychological and ecological. The stories a city tells about itself influence who is seen and who remains invisible; whose suffering is recognised and whose is silenced; which memories are honoured and which are erased; what kinds of futures become imaginable; and how people come to understand their own agency within the civic whole.

The event approaches storytelling as a form of civic infrastructure: a living framework through which communities make meaning together. Stories can become civic rituals, planning tools, healing practices and vessels of collective imagination. They may help restore fractured relationships between people, places, institutions, histories and more-than-human life. They may also reveal and heal the hidden wounds of territories: unresolved grief, displacement, colonial or imperial legacies, ecological destruction, social fragmentation, and intergenerational trauma.

In this context, territorial trauma refers to wounds held not only by individuals, but also within places, communities, landscapes, infrastructures, memories and inherited social patterns. Such wounds may emerge from war, colonisation, forced migration, ecological devastation, political violence, social exclusion, urban rupture or the fragmentation of cultural worlds. Territorial healing, therefore, cannot be reduced to individual therapy or institutional recovery. It calls for reparative relationships with place, memory and collective futures, and for regenerative practices that can help new visions, worldviews and possibilities emerge. 

The event asks how narrative practices can support this work. How can communities move from inherited stories of victimhood, denial, shame, revenge or separation toward stories that make space for dignity, accountability, resilience, reconciliation and renewal? How can storytelling help restore civic identity without imposing a single official narrative? How can marginalised voices, Indigenous wisdom, migrant memory, intergenerational testimony, artistic expression and place-based knowledge become part of a more truthful and inclusive story of the city?

The session brings together three distinctive voices working across storytelling, public leadership, systems change, civic imagination and place-based healing:

Jim Brulé: Transformational storyteller, death doula, teacher, mentor and founder of Transformational Storytelling

Dr. h.c. Violeta Bulc: Founder and curator of the global Ecocivilisation movement; former European Commissioner for Transport and Deputy Prime Minister of Slovenia.

Dave “Tex” Smith: Systems designer, technologist, facilitator, entrepreneur and storyteller from Aotearoa New Zealand

Prof. Dr. Suada Sulejmanovic: Professor at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Sarajevo; Country Chair of Ecocivilisation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Moderator – Dr. Marina Demchenko: founder of the INNER KEY methodology and Research Director of the LCARE Institute, whose work explores wellbeing, regenerative development, territorial healing and the inner dimensions of transformation in human ecosystems.