This issue presents a new angle on the work of (landscape) architects and urban planners of the 1960s and 1970s (Edmund Bacon, Kevin Lynch and Jacques Simon) and of practitioners and academics in the field today (Elena Cogato, Christophe Girot, Anke Schmidt and Bas Smets), and sheds light on recent experiments in academia. OASE 98 presents narration as a means with which to reposition design and the designer as a mediator between the expert and the inhabitant, addressing issues such as bodily experience, sociospatial fragmentation and participation.