Woohoo! I will be speaking as part of a panel at SCARP’s 2nd annual symposium on March 5th, with the broad theme of “Planning for Resilience”. The panel is being presented by yours and my favorite website featuring innovations in urban planning, PlanningPool, run by a group of fellow students in my program.
The panel is entitled “Digital Media: Communication and Engagement for Resilience”:
Engaged, informed and inspired citizens are a critical ingredient for urban resilience in the face of climate change or any other challenge. While the democratization of city planning is increasingly recognized within the profession as a laudable goal, very few planning organizations are yet making full use of the tremendous communication and engagement opportunity represented by blogs and other digital media.
Present and future community planners, urban designers and policymakers attending this symposium are likely to need the skills of written communication and engagement through online media. While graduate training in planning prepares students to be competent academic/bureaucratic report writers, engaging citizens about urban issues using new media like blogs involves a different awareness and skills!
I’ll be doing a 10-minute presentation. But I’m really more excited about the others on the panel: Frances Bula, running hands-down one of the most interesting community blogs in the city, tying the old(er) world of community and civic engagement with the newfangled methods through her fiercely interesting writing, both online and in various print outlets; and Nancy Pepper, a second-year SCARP student who has a theatre background and will be demonstrating it with a hands-on facilitation. Two women I’m incredibly flatted to share a stage with!
Thanks to the editors of PlanningPool for inviting me to speak! My current thoughts on what to speak about are:
- situating the role of social media in public engagement in planning
- challenges and opportunities in:
- using social media for general outreach
- nurturing communities around municipal open data
Based on the conversations I had at CAPS (which I still have a post in draft to discuss! 
), I get the feeling that there’s a lot of anxiety and tension around the tendency for information overload that is part and parcel of using social media, and that planners remain highly skeptical of its value as a result of their experiences using it in their personal lives.
What I’ve been trying to focus on in those discussions is really talking about the why of using social media (as people already understand it) in planning, without even getting into the gory details of the what. To me, it’s really about solidifying those first principles around transparency and leveraging networks as a way in which people make things happen.
For more information and registering to attend, check out the Symposium’s website.
