In the final years of my undergraduate degree and throughout my other graduate-level experience, I made a conscious effort to shed most of the trappings of academic writing. I tried to write in simple, clear sentences. I minimized my use of jargon, making sure to use only those technical terms that were absolutely essential to conveying my meaning. I am not intimidated by complex academic writing, and I am as capable as the next person of parsing it. But I have come to see that thinking clearly and writing clearly are linked, and if the goal of academic writing is to communicate clear—albeit sophisticated and sometimes complex—thinking, then by that measure most academic writing fails miserably. I have also come to know what I was aiming for instead as “para-academic” writing, work that is adjacent to the academy but not necessarily of it.
As an example of what I mean, I want to take a brief look at a journal article from the International Journal of E-Planning Research called “Allocation of Residential Areas in Smart Insular Communities: The Case of Mykonos, Greece.” I’m currently doing research for an annotated bibliography on data-driven (or data-assisted) housing discrimination, so this seemed like it might introduce me to some technologies or methods that would be new to me. It didn’t, and I won’t be using the paper, but it’s a good case study for how academic writing fails at communication, but how it can succeed at something else.
I’m going to skip the abstract, which is mostly just misleading, and instead I’ll start with the first sentence of the paper’s introduction: “Smart cities and communities have already become a dominant trend supporting sustainable urban development through the exploitation of innovative ICT applications and infrastructures.” Immediately I see problems. First, far from being dominant, “smart city” planning has faced fierce resistance in many communities. Second, there is little evidence supporting the authors’ claims about sustainable urban development, though there are many, many instances of either problematic results or outright failures, going all the way back to the infamous FDNY/Rand Corporation collaboration that destroyed many vulnerable New York City neighbourhoods in the 1970s and had serious human rights, policy, and planning impacts lasting decades longer. Perhaps the only word in the entire sentence I wouldn’t quibble with is “trend,” which is to say fashionable in some circles but ultimately unclear in its longevity. Are any of these properties desirable when doing the collaborative work of community planning? I’d hazard not. Does opening a journal article about housing allocation with a sentence as muddled in its facts as this one bode well for clear thinking and clear communication? It does not.
So, what’s actually going on here? In-group signalling. The very first sentence is positioning the authors of the article on a particular side of an ideological divide, while also framing that position as ideologically neutral, or at the very least controversy-free, when it is no such thing. This is not the only kind of in-group signalling going on in the article. From later in the introduction: “The concepts of crowdsourcing, living labs and GIS-based MCDA are intertwined and an extensive participatory exercise takes place.” This sentence is a lot to parse. “Crowdsourcing” is by now a well-known tech-industry buzzword, but in urban planning there is the plainer, established term, “public consultation,” which means essentially the same thing, although there may be a component of timing in this case. “GIS-based MCDA” essentially means looking at maps and quantifying, in the form of numerical scores, geographical features that may have a qualitative impact on the proposed project. This process is inherently ideological, but is presented here, and in the literature around both GIS (Geographical Information Systems) and MCDA (Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis), as being somehow neutral. And what are living labs? Nobody really knows for sure. In this case they appear to be very small-scale town hall-style meetings with fancier presentations. What this sentence tries very hard not to say—what the entire article tries very hard not to say—is that the “smart city” project it discusses mostly boils down to computerizing some maps, professionalizing, through the use of quantification, the assessment of qualitative impacts, and holding two poorly-attended community consultations where citizens could interact with developers and “experts” of one kind or another. Much of the language used to describe this process is nearly unintelligible, even to me, and I am a professional academic editor. But it is meat and drink to both readers and writers with the shared goal of signalling their belonging to a particular academic caste.
When there are in groups, there are also out groups. Later in the article, the authors write about “the active role of citizens in co-shaping the future of development of ‘their’ city.” In an article where the primary stakeholders are defined as citizens, tourists, developers, and “experts,” it’s more than a little condescending to see those scare quotes when referencing the citizens’ claim—and only the citizens’ claim—to a stake in the city. This automatically positions citizens as less-than, either because they lack expertise (the authors discuss the need to “train” citizens), or because their expertise or even their participation only has value at the collective level, while the contributions of experts, including academics and developers, all have inherent value at the individual level. The authors treat citizen participation in the urban planning process as another experimental module to test, rather than the most fundamental work of city building. Far from being any kind of disruption to traditional planning power structures, the methodology presented in the article merely offers the academics an opportunity to insert themselves into those power structures in a new way. Strip away the jargon, the academic over-writing, and the in-group signalling, and there’s very little left to this article except academics inserting themselves into a barely-updated version of a bog-standard planning process that preserves traditional power structures and devalues the input of citizens (despite claiming to do otherwise). Para-academic writing would have made this clear. Although I suppose it might also have prevented the article from being written in the first place.
