Planning Blogs on-line at last!

I finally created a blogspot for Planning Blogs at last. Hopefully this will enable me to put more meat to the watered-down blogs I got published in (the not-quite quarterly) Berita Perancang, the official newsletter of the Malaysian Institute of Planners. I can now easily extract materials for publication too, whenever the Chief Editor of Berita Perancang hounded me for contributions. I must admit that some of the materials here will not be my own thoughts but contributions from some of the readers of Berita Perancang who wrote in. Some of the materials may also be someone else's thoughts that I felt worthy of immortalisation in written form. Whatever they may be, they will mostly be subjects and issues related to town (or city or urban) planning (and that includes rural, regional, spatial, transport, economic and any kind of planning that is practised as a profession, perhaps?) in Malaysia. They are intended as commentaries that might hopefully reach the powers-that-be and struck a real, tuneful chord to move someone to make changes for the better... for the sake of town planning in Malaysia. The first axe to grind is the tendency for people in the town planning profession in this country to regard 'town planning' as meaning physical planning concern with making layout plans, to put it crudely. Like my Chief Editor in Berita Perancang, he was so annoyed when town planners themselves used to ask what he was doing in an environmental NGOs where he once worked, when he was trained as a town planner! At least this perception has changed now. The planners has now accepted that environmental planning is part of town planning (huh?). As if we all didn't know that long before...