The idea of the blog was born around YA’s concern to work towards new outreach and dissemination approaches, which would be able to expand the “impact” of research
outside the academia.

The blog, online since March 2014, publishes two/three posts a week on a wide array of themes (see below for full list): city, conflict, and planning; heritage and sustainability;
dissemination and outreach; resources for planning and geography scholars.

Interest about the blog is growing. Around a thousand of visits have been tracked in the first month from over 40 countries in all continents (see the image!)
- not counting people using wordpress and further readers.

The YA is looking forward for building a team of collaborators willing to contribute on a regular basis (i.e. monthly/bimonthly posts) and/or to support the administration
and moderation of the blog. If you are an early-stage researcher, PhD student, practitioner, or activist, if you consider that joining the YA network could be both a contribution
towards an academia more connected with the “real world out there” and an opportunity for you to engage in academic debates, don’t hesitate to contact Simone Tulumello
(a Coordination Team member of the YA) at aesopya@gmail.com.

Looking forward for hearing from you!

Main thematic areas of the blog are (open list subject to debate and integration):

• • Methodology and ethics: innovative methodological developments and tools; debates about methodological burdens; …
  • Dissemination, outreach, communication: considerations on the instruments used by scholars and practitioners for disseminating their work; potentialities of web-based tools                                                                            for outreach; debates about research evaluation and impact; …
  • Beyond planning: the frontiers of planning and its relationships with further disciplines;
  • Planning, city, and society: covering of urban social movements or protests; reflections on the role of the planner in the “real world”; …
  • Sustainability: debates about the role of planning in the building of sustainable cities/communities; covering of situations of environmental threat; …
  • Heritage and Planning: issues that link heritage with planning include identity politics, sense of place, exclusion-inclusion of views and desires, interpretation and representation                                                                         of the past, present and future; …
  • Book reviews.
  • Events: reports from conferences, meetings of especial interest for the YA community.