Contributor Blog

I had the pleasure of attending two studio final presentations at the Georgia Tech planning program this month: the Lindbergh/Lavista Community studio and the Friendship Village studio.  I'm hardly a neutral observer: I chair the program; but I'm new here and really didn't know what to expect.  I came away refreshed at the insights of the students and enthused at way the university partners with communities to advance good planning. 

If you are a student planning travel to next week's national APA conference, you may be thinking about how to get the most out of the experience. Here are some ideas that have worked for others...

How useful is planning scholarship to planners in practice? Thirty years ago, the author of a British study of information use by planners found, "The journal is not a source of major importance to the planner in practice, though this statement must be taken to reflect inadequate privision and inadequate timeing for reading" (White, 1974). Perspectives differ, but at least some of the problem has been the difficulty of finding relevant scholarship at the moment it is needed. I believe that these difficulties have greatly reduced in the past few years, and that we are on the verge of an unprecedently increase in the use of scholarship in practice fueled by online bibliographic searching and retrieval. From both the scholar's and the practitioner's perspectives, this change will have substantial effects.