Blogging the City: Research, Collaboration, and Engagement in Urban Planning

In November 2013 I chaired a session called "Scholarly Blogging: What? Why?" at The Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) meeting in Toronto. The purpose of the session was to bring together scholars in the United States and Canada who use blogs as platforms for working on research projects. At issue were the merits of blogging as a medium for developing projects, disseminating research results, and achieving other outcomes.

Inspired by our short time together, my session colleagues and I wrote a paper detailing why we do what we do. The paper has just been published by the International Journal of E-Planning Research. We’re grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers who saw our article as making the realities of blogging understandable to a wider readership, and were willing to indulge our atypical first person narrative. What follows is a brief summary of the Toronto session upon which the IJEPR article builds. It focuses on the particular motivations for why each of us has embraced blogging as a form of engaged scholarly activity.

Pierre Clavel blogs at Progressive Cities. Pierre uses his blog to archive and analyze documents related to progressive neighborhood planning in American cities since the 1970s. Many of these planning efforts are the stuff of repressed history, especially where they focused on the redistribution of resources to poor neighborhoods and the opening of city halls to wider public participation (e.g., Harold Washington's work as mayor of Chicago or Ray Flynn's work as mayor of Boston). These initiatives have been unreported and unremembered by scholars and mainstream media alike. Progressive Cities collects and preserves their historical record.

Christopher Leo has an eponymous blog. He tackles another kind of visibility problem as concerns research on the city: limited public access to the scholarly literature about cities. Chris accurately notes that academic publication systems almost guarantee a minimal readership for scholarly work. Blogs can be a solution to that problem, especially when they combine the best of the academic and journalistic enterprises. Chris not only seeks to make good academic research more widely available, but also to demonstrate its value to the planning professions. Moreover, he uses his blog to provide reading material for students and to challenge them to delve into urban issues much more deeply than they ordinarily might.

Kenneth Fox blogs at the Merton-Columbia Project. Ken is working to develop a concept of "blog publication," a corollary to the notion of "oral publication" promoted by sociologist Robert Merton beginning in the 1950s. Like Pierre and Chris, Ken wants to get rarely studied material into the public realm. In this case, the material is from the Robert Merton papers held by Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Robert Merton Literary Estate.  A central objective of the blog is to engage activists and researchers in dialogue about theories of urban social structure and development.   

LaDale Winling blogs at Urban Oasis. For LaDale blogs have several virtues. Echoing Chris Leo, Winling considers blogs as a way to create, maintain, and disseminate a personal archive of academic work. Blogs can actually boost productivity by preventing an author from becoming too much of a perfectionist. They are also a way to create an online scholarly identity, something that's especially important in a world where everyone and everything can be googled. Most importantly, blogs allow a scholar to actively shape the identity that others encounter on the web.

The session was very nicely discussed by Anabel Quan-Haase, who directs and writes for The Sociodigital Lab. Anabel wrote the introductory section of the IJEPR paper, framing the topic of academic blogging in a wider social media context. With the rest of us, Anabel sees blogging as an excellent tool for disseminating knowledge and agrees about the relationship between blogging and personal identity. Blogging helps to "write oneself into being." However, contributing to a community is also important. To accomplish that goal, a blog doesn’t need a huge audience. Bloggers should aim for a particular niche, and they can succeed even if the space they establish lies in the "long tail" of a readership’s distribution. In fact a well-attended SACRPH roundtable discussion on "The Physical City: Social Change and Urban Space" noted the important role that blogs played in sharing information, connecting strangers, and building community during the Occupy Wall Street movement. Some Occupy-focused blogs—like like Peter Marcuse's—offered very useful suggestions to those of us in other cities about what it takes to effectively sustain an urban insurgency.

Occupy Wall Street, Day 47 (David Shankbone, Wikimedia Commons)

As these short excerpts from our Toronto discussions demonstrate, my blogging colleagues are keen to use their platforms as a way to more widely disseminate scholarly knowledge about the city, especially knowledge that, for whatever reason, has been purposely forgotten or simply fallen between the cracks. There is no one best way to do this. Whether there are any institutional rewards for scholarly blogging—i.e., whether the work will be valued by university tenure and promotion committees—is another matter. We generally agree that blogging is something younger scholars need to carefully balance with more traditional forms of writing; i.e., they need to find the right level of "digital engagement."

But blogging is still writing, and can invigorate scholarship. Certainly, writing for my home blog Intercultural Urbanism liberated and sharpened my thinking about the city. It also created numerous opportunities—like the invitation to chair the Scholarship Blogging session at SACRPH, and James Brasuell’s invitation to write for Planetizen—that I never would have gained if I limited myself to traditional forms of writing in and for my academic discipline. And echoing Chris Leo, blogging has considerable pedagogical utility. It has helped me better focus my teaching while giving my students the sense that their writing about the city for class assignments really matters (e.g., see here and here).

Big Data (Wikipedia)

The Scholarship Blogging session succeeded in sponsoring a fruitful discussion of its subject across the disciplines of anthropology, history, sociology, and urban planning. Still, participants were puzzled that our session wasn't better attended given today’s tectonic shifts in how information about the city is being gathered and disseminated. This was especially puzzling given what I took to be the most compelling discussion topic that percolated throughout the SACRPH conference over its three days, one that remains salient today. That topic concerns the relative merits of Big Data Generalizations vs. Particular Narratives of Place as a way to understand the life of a city. Aggregated Big Data (e.g., individual transactions gathered from smart phones, credit card purchases, and other sources of information) invite all sorts of interesting studies of consumer choice and human behavior as they relate to urban planning. However, at the end of the day there's no substitute for the individual, place-based, "thickly described" narratives that document city life in all of its sensory glory: the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feels, the chance encounters, the brushes with human difference. This is the stuff of city life that bloggers are uniquely positioned to communicate.

Several other Toronto SACRPH sessions highlighted the importance of place-based narratives for humanizing and, where appropriate, politicizing that which Big Data risks dehumanizing and depoliticizing. Indeed, I was delighted to discover that an anthropological sensibility was clearly in evidence throughout the three days of meetings. In addition to championing anthropological methods, panelists in several sessions noted the role of culture in shaping the questions we ask about cities and anthropology’s utility in drawing larger meaning from individual narratives about city life. There was a clear concern to unify planning theory and practice and to engage the public in participatory planning and design. Many in the session audiences seemed to favor these fully experiential and deeply anthropological approaches to studying city life, educating planning professionals, and formulating urban policy. Given this receptivity, blogging is a particularly good way to advance those understandings of the city that many urbanists across disciplines and national borders are keen to develop.