Retired Faculty: Keeping Up With Them Via Blogs

With the proliferation of new media planning practitioners have new ways to find out about the continuing work of planning faculty members who have retired. Not all of them blog of course, but the list below demonstrates some of the variety of these efforts.

• Emeritus Columbia Professor Peter Marcuse, blogging at http://pmarcuse.wordpress.com/, can be relied upon for provocative insights about current events. His recent postings explore Occupy Wall Street but earlier blogs have investigated a number of his other interests such as the foreclosure crisis, housing policy, and social capital.

• Pierre Clavel, recently retired from Cornell, has a blog and resource site at http://www.progressivecities.org/. His blogging is in support of his wider project of highlighting work on progressive cities. He has an excellent bibliography at http://www.progressivecities.org/bibliography/.

• In the UK, Cliff Hague, an emeritus professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, blogs at http://cliffhague.planningresource.co.uk/, a site affiliated with the Royal Town Planning Institute. Hague's "World View" blog deals with topics of global concern such as innovation, UN conferences, and regional resilience. Recent blogs feature cases in Europe, Africa, and Australia.

• A slightly different take is the Sid Grava blog, set up on his death in 2009: http://sigurdgrava.blogspot.com/2009/09/sigurd-grava-professor-emeritus-of.html. It acts as a memorial for this long-time Columbia planning faculty member.

Of course there are a number of blogs by more senior but not yet emeritus faculty, for example Larry Susskind at MIT (http://theconsensusbuildingapproach.blogspot.com/). These are also well worth watching.