{"id":3078,"date":"2013-10-22T12:09:11","date_gmt":"2013-10-22T18:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=3078"},"modified":"2013-10-23T11:46:12","modified_gmt":"2013-10-23T17:46:12","slug":"blogging-the-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=3078","title":{"rendered":"Blogging the City"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1<\/a><\/b>The Society for American City and Regional Planning History<\/a>\u00a0 (SACRPH) held its biennial meeting in Toronto earlier this month.\u00a0 I was delighted \u00a0to have been invited by SACRPH\u2019s incoming president, Joe Heathcott<\/a> (whom I first met courtesy of his appearance in the film The Myth of Pruitt-Igoe<\/i><\/a>) to chair a session on Scholarship Blogging: What? Why<\/i>?\u00a0 The purpose of session was to bring together scholars who use blogs as platforms for working on research projects.\u00a0 At issue were the merits of blogging as a medium for disseminating research, developing projects, and achieving other outcomes. In this post I\u2019ll report a few of the takeaway messages of this very stimulating session.<\/p>\n

\"1<\/a><\/p>\n

Pierre Clavel<\/strong> organized the session. He blogs at Progressive Cities<\/a>.\u00a0 Pierre uses his blog to archive and analyze documents related to progressive neighborhood planning in American cities since the 1970s.\u00a0 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<\/a>\u2019s work as mayor of\u00a0 Chicago or Ray Flynn<\/a>\u2019s work as mayor of Boston). \u00a0These initiatives have been unreported and\/or unremembered by scholars and mainstream media alike. Progressive Cities collects and preserves their historical record.<\/p>\n

\"2<\/a><\/p>\n

Christopher Leo<\/strong> blogs at Christopher Leo<\/a>.\u00a0 Chris is a senior scholar at the University of Winnipeg and a former journalist.\u00a0 He tackles another kind of visibility problem as concerns research on the city.\u00a0 That problem is limited public access to the scholarly literature about cities. \u00a0Chris 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\"3<\/a><\/p>\n

Kenneth Fox<\/strong> blogs at the\u00a0Merton-Columbia Project<\/a>. \u00a0Ken is working to develop a concept of \u201cblog publication\u201d, a corollary to the notion of \u201coral publication\u201d promoted by sociologist Robert Merton<\/a> beginning in the 1950s. Like Pierre and Chris, Ken wants to get rarely studied material into the public realm. In this case, the \u00a0material is from the Robert Merton papers held by \u00a0Columbia University\u2019s Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Robert Merton Literary Estate. \u00a0A central objective for the blog is to engage current activists and researchers in dialogue about theories of urban social structure and development. In his presentation Ken reminded us of the importance of carefully adhering to permission conditions if blogs are to succeed in providing archival material for wider study.<\/p>\n

\"4<\/a><\/p>\n

LaDale Winling<\/strong> blogs at Urban Oasis<\/a>. A historian on the tenure track at Virginia Tech, LaDale is a younger scholar who has been blogging since 2004.\u00a0 For LaDale blogs have several virtues. \u00a0Echoing Chris Leo, they are a way to create, maintain, and disseminate a personal body of academic work.\u00a0 They are also a way to create an online scholarly identity–something that\u2019s especially important in a world where everyone and everything can be googled. Most importantly, blogs allow a scholar to actively shape<\/i> the identity that others encounter on the web.<\/p>\n

\"5<\/a><\/p>\n

The session was very nicely discussed by Anabel Quan-Haase<\/a><\/strong>, an Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies and Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. \u00a0Anabel writes at sociodigital.info<\/a>. \u00a0Like the other panelists, she sees blogging as an excellent tool for disseminating knowledge. \u00a0She agreed with LaDale about the relationship between blogging and personal identity.\u00a0 In Anabel\u2019s words, blogging helps to \u201cwrite oneself into being.\u201d \u00a0However, contributing to a community<\/i> is also important.\u00a0 To accomplish that goal a blog doesn\u2019t need a huge audience.\u00a0 Bloggers should be aiming for a particular niche, and they can succeed even if the space they establish lies in the \u201clong tail\u201d of a readership’s distribution.<\/p>\n

As a first-time SACRPH attendee I wasn\u2019t sure what to expect from the session. I certainly \u00a0expected participants to be supportive of the blogging enterprise.\u00a0 \u00a0Ladale Winling has already posted some of his takeaway lessons<\/a> at Urban Oasis:<\/p>\n

One of the things this panel illustrated for me is that academic (certainly historians\u2019) concerns about blogging have not changed much since 2004 when I started blogging. The main one is about taking time away from writing for publication. The second one is about putting ideas out that will be swiped by someone else. Both of these have to do with the publish or perish standard we have adopted for tenure and tenure-track positions, as well as tenure-track hopefuls. If there was a third, I would say it was about the issue of feedback and community.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No one on the panel seemed much concerned about having their blogged ideas stolen. As demonstrated above, the panelists are keen to use their blogs 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.\u00a0 Whether there are any institutional rewards for scholarly blogging\u2014e.g., whether the work will be valued by university tenure and promotion committees\u2014is another matter.\u00a0 There seemed to be general agreement that blogging is something younger scholars need to carefully balance with more traditional forms of writing; they need to find the right level of \u201cdigital engagement.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0But blogging is<\/i> writing, and LaDale notes in his post how his blogging invigorates<\/i> his scholarship. \u00a0I have to agree.\u00a0 Writing regularly for Intercultural Urbanism<\/i><\/a> has certainly liberated and sharpened my thinking about the city. \u00a0It has also created numerous opportunities\u2014like Joe Heathcott\u2019s invitation to chair the Scholarship Blogging<\/i> session at SACRPH\u2014that I never would have gained if I limited myself to traditional forms of writing in and for my academic discipline.\u00a0 And echoing Chris Leo, blogging has helped me better focus my teaching while giving at least a few of my students the sense that their<\/i> writing about the city really matters (e.g., see here<\/a> and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"Yonge<\/a>

Yonge Street and Dundas Square, Toronto (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n

Toronto is a great place to have a conference about cities. \u00a0SACRPH was one of the more stimulating interdisciplinary conferences that I’ve ever attended. \u00a0And the\u00a0S<\/em>cholarship Blogging<\/i> session\u00a0succeeded in sponsoring a fruitful discussion of its subject across the disciplines of anthropology, history, sociology, and urban planning. \u00a0Still, participants were puzzled that the session wasn’t better attended given today\u2019s \u201ctectonic shifts\u201d in how information about the city is being gathered and disseminated. \u00a0This was especially puzzling given what I took to be the most<\/em> compelling discussion topic that percolated throughout the SACRPH conference over its three days. That topic concerns the relative merits of Big Data Generalizations<\/a><\/strong> vs. Particular Narratives of Place<\/b> as a way to understand the life of a city.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But at the end of the day there\u2019s no substitute for the individual, place-based, thickly described<\/a> narrative that documents city life in all of its sensory glory: the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feels, the chance encounters, the brushes with human difference. \u00a0A well-attended SACRPH roundtable discussion on The Physical City: Social Change and Urban Space<\/i> noted the important role that blogs played in sharing information, connecting strangers, and building community during the Occupy Wall Street insurgency. \u00a0Some Occupy-focused blogs–like Peter Marcuse’s<\/a>–offered very useful suggestions to those of us in other cities about what it takes to sustain an urban movement<\/a>. \u00a0Several other SACRPH sessions highlighted the importance of place-based narratives for humanizing and, where appropriate, politicizing that which Big Data risks dehumanizing and depoliticizing.\u00a0 Throughout the conference assembled crowds seemed to favor these fully experiential approaches to studying city life, educating planning professionals, and formulating urban policy. \u00a0If that\u2019s truly the case, then blogging is one of the best ways to advance those understandings of the city that SACRPH attendees seemed keenest to develop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Society for American City and Regional Planning History\u00a0 (SACRPH) held its biennial meeting in Toronto earlier this month.\u00a0 I was delighted \u00a0to have been invited by SACRPH\u2019s incoming president, Joe Heathcott (whom I first met courtesy of his appearance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-NE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3078"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3117,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078\/revisions\/3117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}