Planning Faculty Blogs

One of my first posts back in 2007 dealt with planning faculty blogs (see http://www.planetizen.com/node/24748).

3 minute read

September 16, 2010, 4:27 PM PDT

One of my first posts back in 2007 dealt with planning faculty blogs (see http://www.planetizen.com/node/24748).

This month I update that post, returning to the long-running blogs and introducing some new ones. Not many faculty blog consistently and having created monthly blogs on Planetizen for well over three years I can understand why-productive faculty already write a great deal and blogging is yet one more thing to do. Having decided to focus on advice for planning students in my Planetizen blog I find, however, it can save time. Most of the questions I deal with in my Planetizen blog are ones that I am asked repeatedly by students. Now I just (notoriously) ask them, "have you read my blog yet?" The blog often answers their questions or else helps them ask more focused questions. For planning faculty, topical blogs require more complex decisions about what to blog about and what can be better placed in a scholarly article. The following blogs are mostly topical although the first one also contains advice.

This week's finds in planning by Martin Krieger (USC) has been a terrific resource for doctoral students and junior faculty for some years: http://blogs.usc.edu/sppd/krieger/. It is mostly a blog providing advice, although it does deal with Krieger's research interest in multimedia. One of the first bloggers in planning, Krieger seems to have stopped posting lately-I only hope it's because he's doing other terrific things!

Urban planning research by Randy Crane (UCLA) is also a long-running blog: http://planning-research.com/. A worthwhile feature is that the blog often features guest entries. This approach perhaps explains how he has managed to keep such a rich blog going for so long-when his energy has flagged he could have guests fill in for a bit. Scroll down to find the word cloud that acts as an index. There's an impressive amount of material!

Sustainable cities and transport at http://lisaschweitzer.com/ by Lisa Schweitzer (USC, UCLA graduate) has been in operation since May 2009 and covers an amazingly rich variety of subject matter within the general sustainable cities theme. I appreciate how she incorporates photos and small images of web sites-it's a visually interesting blog.

Healthy metropolis by Ann Forsyth (Cornell, UCLA graduate), yes me, is a blog I recently started to talk about some of the resources I come across as I do work on health, sustainability, and metropolitan areas: http://healthymetropolis.blogspot.com/. It is somewhat drier in tone than the other blogs, focused on timely information.

A complete listing of my Planetizen blogs is available at http://www.planetizen.com/blog/10386 and all but the most recent are categorized by topic at the top of http://www.annforsyth.net/forstudents.html. My earlier post includes some other blogs by planning faculty and folks in closely related fields, notably University of Minnesota engineer David Levinson's the transportationist at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/levin031/transportationist/. After I posted this blog I came across on more, the blog of Jason Corburn at Berkeley--on healthy cities-- http://healthyurbanplanning.blogspot.com/.

My promised blog on planning processes is still in process!

Blogs Faculty Web 2.0 multimedia

Ann Forsyth

Trained in planning and architecture, Ann Forsyth is a professor of urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. From 2007-2012 she was a professor of city and regional planning at Cornell. She taught previously at at the University of Minnesota, directing the Metropolitan Design Center (2002-2007), Harvard (1999-2002), and the University of Massachusetts (1993-1999) where she was co-director of a small community design center, the Urban Places Project. She has held short-term positions at Columbia, Macquarie, and Sydney Universities.

I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching. Mary G., Urban Planner

I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching.

Mary G., Urban Planner

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