Alongside his academic and teaching career at Griffith University in Queensland, Tony Matthews has also stepped into the role of being a thought-provoking public voice on urban issues.
In advance of speaking at last week’s UrbanismNZ 2023 conference in Auckland on 27 April, Tony happily shared some of his thoughts on this vocational ‘side gig’ for this blog, as well as some tips for anyone wanting to be seen to be more vocal about the societal, environmental and economic challenges of city making.
P.S. As a hyperlocal hint: You can start by writing articles for this blog!
Tony’s story
“I started to do public engagement and commentary seriously from 2016 onwards,” says Tony. “To begin with I just thought why wouldn’t people be interested in the sorts of stories from the world that I inhabit, namely urban and environmental planning, if they were well explained to them? After all, how those things play out together, how cities are formed and changed, represent a big dimension of everybody’s life really and the world we’re all living in.”
Tony: “My public writing for The Conversation opened up other opportunities to write for and be syndicated by other publications. This public communications moved over into the early days of podcasts and into a show that was broadcast by the ABC called The Urban Squeeze. This then supported the later establishment of a group called the Urban Broadcast Collective, which brought multiple urban podcasts under a single brand. There are no shortage of interesting stories to tell and it turns out people like hearing them.
“It’s all been, and continues to be, an enormously enriching part of my life. It means I get to share cutting edge research findings with a very wide audience who actually care about them and can do something with them, rather than everything sort of just disappearing in behind a scientific paywall”.
Tony readily acknowledges that many professionals working around issues like urban design and environmental planning for the government or private sector clients don’t have the same freedom to express opinions as he does, which makes him a “rare exception”.
“It’s understandable that many urban designers and planners become a little bit passive about using their voice. Even so, I wouldn’t be the only person to say that they could, if they go about doing it well, create more of a profile for themselves as advocates for better quality outcomes. There are ways of doing that collectively. Planning institutes, for example, and professional organisations and peak bodies should all have a role in this.
Tony’s tips
“My tips are simple. The first is to find your audience and to remember it’s better having a small audience that’s interested, than having no audience at all. You have heaps of opportunities to self-publish anywhere you want across multiple channels.
“Second, ask yourself what your product is, and do you have the content, time, production skills, and commitment to keep your project going for a while.
“Lastly, another question worth asking yourself, if you ever do think about going more public with your work, or becoming more publicly known, is whether you can cope with some of the negative feedback you might get back, where people just plain don’t like your ideas or whatever.
“Some people might disagree with those ideas, maybe even very strongly. If you’re getting a lot of blowback you’ll have a sense of where the line might fall on that, but you still have to deal with the criticism”.
See also:
- Tony Matthews’ substack Sights on Cities
- Griffith University – Urban Squeeze and the Urban Collective
