After running the ‘Rambling in the City’ WordPress blog with much enthusiasm and effort from 2011-2019 (see the 876 archived posts before this one), I finally allowed my cynicism to get the better of me, and stopped posting entirely. This was partly an outcome of more academic and policy writing on my plate (for write I must), but frankly, it became too difficult to deal with the self-censorship, self-doubt and anxiety I experienced while writing publicly in an increasingly polarised social milieu.
When I began Rambling… in 2011, I was re-entering the world of ‘the urban’ after a hiatus of 6 years of media and content work of a more general nature. Working on cities and their problems hands-on was exciting, and even when I transitioned to the world of research in 2015, I brought an embedded and experiential perspective to my writing. But nine years as a policy researcher taught me to see larger patterns and gave me the confidence to speak to the big questions about how cities form, what sort of opportunities they foster, how they shape human activity and society, and so on.
Today, when cities face myriad crises (climate change, social strife, resource and infrastructure shortages), I feel the urge to bring together my two writing personas - the ‘city rambler’ and the ‘urbanist’ - together to help make sense of why our cities are in the predicament they are in, how we can think through the solutions on the table, and what urban dwellers can do to help make our cities liveable, productive and sustainable places. So this is what Rambling 2.0 will be about. Wish me luck!