Why City Planners Blog

"Blogs are emerging as important information sources in the contemporary discourse on cities and city planning," observes Michael Dudley, Research Associate and Librarian for the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg in a recent post on Planetizen.

Dudley cites several ways in which blogs can help professional planners develop better processes and products, including:

1. Allowing planners to contribute to community debate in a very timely way;
2. Initiating dialogue--postings are always subject to commentary and refutation;
3. Helping planners to keep track of, understand and--more importantly--mentally integrate perspectives from multiple sources to combine them with their own thoughts and observations.

As a form of communication with colleagues and the public, an attractive environment for citizen engagement, a way to track trends and issues, and as a resource for the planning educator--"the blog can become an important and exciting part of the planner’s professional toolkit."

It is becoming relatively common for cities to use blogs for general communication, venues that Oak Harbor planner Rob Voight describes as "a kind of voice mail on growth hormone." By developing project-specific blogs for the issues related to subdivision regulations (as in his site, http://www.cohsubdivisions.blogspot.com/), Voight has pioneered use of these online tools in ways that are innovative for municipalities.

Voight contends that blogging "is not only a tool but an entirely new platform for community engagement."