BLOG sites and SLUM areas: common places for Urban Development solutions

BLOG sites and SLUM areas: common places for Urban Development solutions

While the urban development becomes increasingly an emergency issue, the professional, academic and the institutional sectors which are theoretically expected to cooperate in order to face the emergency, are more and more isolated from each other. Each sector uses its own language while the sector members tend to communicate among themselves cloistered within their ivory towers.

In order to keep their positions and status, Academics are somehow obliged to publish articles – though lacking any effective meaning - on urban development, quoting sentences, which promote the author of the quoted article who will pay them back quoting them in return for thankfulness.

Professionals struggle to publish their fieldwork exercises on specialized magazines because they cannot quote previous cases of the same kind since there is no known case to quote. In addition, the language spoken by professionals is more reporting-oriented than quoting-oriented.

Professionals are sometimes not keen either to share their own success stories, as they prefer to keep them for themselves for future reference to use within similar missions, without making any particular effort.

The Institutional sector, on the other hand, has nothing to write and communicate either to Academics or to the Professionals because most of the times, the officials of international organizations know nothing about urban planning issues. They prefer to minimize the knowledge of their activities to avoid any criticism or jeopardizing the status quo, that is to say the relationships with local authorities and their well-paid positions.

As for the Donors, they take advantage of this lack of communication between Professionals, Academics and other Institutions (particularly the donor representatives at the local level). In such a silent environment, Donors can autonomously and independently decide, on their own, policies, strategies and practices, which could be finally based on national policies (agreed with the central government institutions), international development strategies (agreed with other international institutions), budgets and a few other internal constraints.

Basically there is only one place where, Academics, Professionals and representatives of the International Organizations, could, independently and individually, publish: the blog sites.

Blogs could be considered in principle the no man’s lands where the above-mentioned categories could meet.The blog area is informal. Here the Academics can publish without quoting their research studies; professionals can freely publish their tests and findings otherwise hidden in the deep oblivion. Likewise, the representatives of the International Organizations can submit their honest and humble perceptions on urban development without c/cing it to a dozens of superiors and colleagues.

The blog is free: nothing is due to spread their first impressions, perceptions and insights before these become professional suggestions, official advice and recommendations, or scientifically based theses supported by several proving tests.

The blog is however in most cases low quality made, barely similar to “low cost” technologies for building constructions, which are in turn, typical of the informal urban areas where you can unexpectedly find smart ideas, creative proposals, interesting positions, and key arguments.

The blog is just like a slum area. Like slums, blogs hide urban development strategies in the embryonic phase, even though they finally lack scientific support.